Mr Southey, in his subsequent lives of conquerors, and his other writings, will hardly be thought to have acted up to this "abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them." Nor is he to be blamed for qualifying his view of the subject, equally blameless (surely) as they are to be held who have retained their old views, especially by him who helped to impress them. His friend Mr Wordsworth, in the vivacity of his admonitions to hasty complaints of evil, has gone so far as to say that "Carnage is God's daughter," and thereby subjected himself to the scoffs of a late noble wit. He is addressing the Deity himself:-- "But thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is man, array'd for mutual slaughter: Yea, Carnage is thy daughter." Mr Wordsworth is a great poet and a philosophical thinker, in spite of his having here paid a tremendous compliment to a rhyme (for unquestionably the word "slaughter" provoked him into that imperative "Yea," and its subsequent venturous affiliation); but the judgment, to say no more of it, is rash. Whatever the Divine Being intends, by his permission or use of evil, it becomes us to think the best of it; but not to affirm the appropriation of the particulars to him under their worst appellation, seeing that he has implanted in us a horror of them, and a wish to do them away. What it is right in him to do, is one thing; what it is proper in us to affirm that he actually does, is another. And, above all, it is idle to affirm what he intends to do for ever, and to have us eternally venerate and abstain from questioning an evil. All good and evil, and vice and virtue themselves, might become confounded in the human mind by a like daring; and humanity sit down under every buffet of misfortune, without attempting to resist it: which, fortunately, is impossible. Plato cut this knotty point better, by regarding evil as a thing senseless and unmalignant (indeed no philosopher regards anything as malignant, or malignant for malignity's sake); out of which, or notwithstanding it, good is worked, and to be worked, perhaps, finally to the abolition of evil. But whether this consummation be possible or not, and even if the dark horrors of evil be necessary towards the enjoyment of the light of good, still the horror must be maintained, where the object is really horrible; otherwise, we but the more idly resist the contrast, if necessary--and, what is worse, endanger the chance of melioration, if possible.