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individuals, like myself, who still cherish the flame which he once 
enkindled. Here and there you meet families in which the 
tradition of admiration is handed down. I may mention that the 
present Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, while his venerable father 
was still living, presiding over a whole host of children and grand- 
children, pointed out to me with satisfaction that I was looking on 
three generations of the worshippers of Southey. But these are 
exceptions, and it is therefore instructive from time to time to 
recall the thoughts of the younger generation to the household 
gods of their fathers, and to poems which have retained a more 
living popularity, where may be seen traces of Southey’s influence 
by those to whom his melodies are familiar. For example, I doubt 
whether any single poet has so deeply coloured the phraseology of 
Keble’s “ Christian Year” as Southey. 
Again, he is an author of whom, speaking impartially, we must 
say that his writings exhibit extraordinary inequalities. Few poets 
or prose authors of our time have written books at once so good 
and so poor. Dryden is perhaps another example. Of his history 
of the Peninsular War, the Duke of Wellington is reported to 
have said: “Mr. Southey, Sir, may be a very clever man; but 
he has not understood the plan of one of my campaigns, nor the 
object of one of my battles.” And of his Poems, “Joan of Arc,” 
“The Vision of Judgment,” and many of his Laureate Odes, have. 
sunk into a gulf of oblivion from which it would be impossible 
ever to rescue them. We must acknowledge this. 
His opinions, too, were of the most unequal importance. 
Having begun life as a revolutionary Radical, he ended it asa 
most uncompromising Conservative. There was a vehemence in 
both extremes which belonged to the same defect of character. 
Lord Macaulay says, that in passing “from one extreme of 
political opinion to another, he has constantly contrived, like 
Milton’s Satan going round the globe, to ‘ride with darkness.’ 
Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment 
chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who 
could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight 
in the course of a journey to the antipodes.” This, no doubt, 
