the benefit of a class of women, whether single or widowed, who with
difficulty find any active employment--who are not paupers, but whose
poverty condemns them to a cheerless, solitary existence. If Robert
Owen of Lanark comes across his path, no fear of having his own early
dream of Pantisocracy revived before him, of being reproached for an
old abandoned faith, (the constant terror of men who feel themselves
apostates,) prevents him from expressing the natural interest which
such a man, and the projects he _then_ had in view, naturally excited
within him. His _Colloquies_ may not earn him a reputation amongst
political economists; but no one will deny the philanthropic spirit
which they breathe. In his _Life of Wesley_, and all his religious or
theological publications, however devoted he may show himself to the
Church of England, he never fails to inquire how this great institution
may be made still more serviceable to the nation at large, and this,
too, by embracing within its pale those very sectaries towards whom he
was accused of having so bigoted and unfriendly a feeling.
Those of his opponents who, in the later part of his career, were
accustomed to represent Southey as the unscrupulous, drilled, formal
advocate of a party in Church and State, ready for his pension and his
pay, for court honours and the praise of bishops, to espouse its cause
to the utmost, never made a greater mistake in their lives. Innumerable
proofs are here before us in his letters, if we did not find them
in his works, that he retained to the last a certain bold, erratic,
independent manner of thinking, quite his own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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