There is nothing, for instance, so well known of Southey--if we may be allowed to anticipate a little, and to plunge, like the epic poets, _in medias res_--nothing so notorious as the change which his political and social opinions underwent; the sentiments of his youth upon government, and the organisation of society, being almost diametrically opposed to those of his maturer years. The contrast is great between the young republican, the ardent communist, the bold experimenter in _Pantisocracy_, the author of the _Book of the Church_, and the celebrated champion of Conservative principles in the _Quarterly Review_. But often as the contrast has been held up to notice, the time has only just arrived when it can be surveyed in the right spirit. _The whole life_ of the man is now before us; and, contradictory as the parts may have appeared as the long picture was slowly unrolled to the eyes of contemporaries, it now becomes possible for us to see the real coherence that existed between the several parts, and to trace throughout their very inconsistencies a unity, and an honourable unity, of character. The enthusiasm of the youth enables us to understand whatever was peculiar in the maturer man. The earlier mind of Southey throws light, we think, upon the later. It was the same mind, it was the same man, young and old. We learn from the biography before us, that the imagination of Southey had been early and too exclusively developed; and whether from this circumstance, or from natural temperament, a close, systematic, scientific mode of reasoning was the mental quality or mental exercise in which, throughout life, he least distinguished himself. His affections were ardent and generous, his moral sentiments invariably pure and noble, his piety unalterable; his judgment, wherever abstract and general principles were to be dealt with, was, to the last, often hasty, incomplete, vague, uncertain. But if his reasoning was never that "dry light" of which Bacon speaks, it never, in his case, was mingled with other passions or feelings than those which did honour to his nature. Above all, there was throughout his career the utmost sincerity in the expression of his opinion; no taint of hypocrisy, no reserve, no timidity--a want sometimes of caution, never that prudence which is the disguise of cowardice,--you had at all times the genuine unaffected utterance of the man. He was not even the least apprehensive of ridicule. He would have borne martyrdom before a host of jesters, which some have thought to be not the lightest species of martyrdom. If astrology had found favour in his sight, he would have expressed his belief in it before the whole conclave of the Royal Society. Whatever seemed truth to him, had its clear, manly, unhesitating avowal. Of an ardent disposition, impatient of slow thinking or of long and intricate reasoning, eager, confident, somewhat too self-relying, his was not the mind peculiarly fitted for expounding abstract principles;--we