Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away to Grasmere--to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained, disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts; he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish appointment--“as if,” he said, “the author of _Joan of Arc_, and of _Thalaba_, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Yet for that poem of _Thalaba_, in a twelve-month after issue, he had only received as his share of profits a matter of £3 15s. Indeed, Southey would have fared hardly money-wise in those times, if he had not won the favor of a great many good and highly placed friends; and it was only four years after his establishment at Keswick, when these friends succeeded in securing to him an annual Government pension of £200. Landor had possibly aided him before this time; he certainly had admired greatly his poems and given praise that would have been worth more, if he had not spoiled it by rating Southey as a poet so much above Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.[4] In addition to these aids the _Quarterly Review_ was set afoot in those days in London--of which sturdy defender of Church and State, Southey soon became a virtual pensioner. Moreover, with his tastes, small moneys went a long way; he was methodical to the last degree; he loved his old coats and habits; he loved his marches and countermarches among the hills that flank Skiddaw better than he loved horses, or dogs, or guns; a quiet evening in his library with his books, was always more relished than ever so good a place at Drury Lane. New friends and old brighten that retirement for him. He has his vacation runs to Edinboro’--to London--to Bristol; the children are growing (though there is death of one little one--away from home); the books are piling up in his halls in bigger and always broader ranks. He writes of Brazil, of Spanish matters, of new poetry, of Nelson, of Society--showing touches of his early radicalism, and of a Utopian humor, which age and the heavy harness of conventionalism he has learned to wear, do not wholly destroy. He writes of Wesley and of the Church--settled in those maturer years into a comfortable routine-ordered Churchism, which does not let too airy a conscience prick him into unrest. A good, safe monarchist, too, who comes presently, and rightly enough--through a suggestion of George IV., then Regent in place of crazy George III.[5]--by his position as Poet Laureate; and in that capacity writes a few dismally stiff odes, which are his worst work. Even Wordsworth, who walks over those Cumberland hills with reverence, and with a pious fondness traces the “star-shaped shadows on the naked stones”--cannot warm to Southey’s new gush over royalty in his New Year’s Odes.