the best English poem that has left the press since _Paradise Lost_. Indeed, this is not exaggerated praise, for there is no competition.’ On another occasion Southey writes: ‘_Thalaba_ is finished. You will, I trust, find the Paradise a rich poetical picture, a proof that I can employ magnificence and luxury of language when I think them in place. One overwhelming propensity has formed my destiny, and marred all prospects of rank or wealth; but it has made me happy, and it will make me immortal.’ In a letter written in 1815, he modestly remarks that nothing could be more absurd than thinking of comparing any of his pieces with _Paradise Lost_; but that with Tasso, with Virgil, with Homer, there might be fair grounds of comparison! Nor did he think more meanly of himself as an historian, for he predicted that he would stand above Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; nay, he went even further, and challenged comparison with the Father of History. ‘I have flattered myself,’ he says, ‘that my _History of Brazil_ might in more points than one be compared to Herodotus, and will hereafter stand in the same relation to the history of that large portion of the new world as his History does to that of the old.’ Southey’s friend and admirer, Walter Savage Landor, resembled him in the exalted notions he entertained of the value of his own productions. ‘I have published,’ he says in the conversation with Hare, ‘five volumes of _Imaginary Conversations_; cut the most of them through the middle, and there will remain in the decimal fraction enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.’ ‘Be patient!’ he says in another place. ‘From the higher heavens of poetry it is long before the radiance of the brightest star can reach the world below. We hear that one man finds out one beauty, another man finds out another, placing his observatory and instruments on the poet’s grave. The worms must have eaten us before we rightly know what we are. It is only when we are skeletons that we are boxed, and ticketed, and shown. Be it so! I shall not be tired of waiting.’ Knowing, he again writes, that in two thousand years there have not been five volumes of prose (the work of one man) equal to his _Conversations_, he could indeed afford to wait. If conscious of earthly things, we fear he may be waiting still.