That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike _sanity_ which distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the _Anti-Jacobin_, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his over-valuation of Kirke White,[436] which was undoubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly right. In respect of older literature, in particular,[437] his catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn[438] are quite early, quite original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in the preface to _Christabel_, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering. [Sidenote: _Reviews._] Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the _Annual_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ from the list given by his son at the end of the _Life_, some notice must be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of _belles lettres_ to which this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the looking up are, in the _Annual_, those on _Gebir_, Godwin’s _Chaucer_, Ritson’s _Romances_, Hayley, Froissart, _Sir Tristram_, Ellis’s _Specimens_, Todd’s _Spenser_, and _Ossian_; in the _Quarterly_, those on Chalmers’s _Poets_, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not Robert).[439] [Sidenote: The Doctor.]