those attacks appears in the shifts to which Byron resorted to explain himself,--to be imputed, however, not to cowardice, but to his wavering habit of mind. Great writers in our country have frequently stirred difficult questions in religion and life, and then seemed to be half scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by the reverberation of their own voices. Shelley almost alone was always ready to declare, "I meant what I said, and stand to it." Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the Thirty-Nine Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following month (October 1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George III. The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt. It does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor to compel our respect for the author of the _Life of Nelson_, and the open-handed friend of Coleridge; nor is it any disparagement that, with the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle life changed his political and other opinions. But in his dealings with Lord Byron, Southey had "eaten of the insane root." He attacked a man of incomparably superior powers, for whom his utter want of humour--save in its comparatively childish forms--made him a ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty in being gibbeted in satires that will endure with the language. The strife, which seems to have begun on Byron's leaving England, rose to its height when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious defence of his character against "the Remarks" in Blackwood, 1819 (August), accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander.