“Here are eight themes for poets, every one of which has the advantage of being real, and not fading away upon analysis. Here are pleasure-domes that are truly “stately,” rivers that are truly “sacred,” caverns that are truly “measureless to man.” These modern themes have only one drawback, from the point of view of the poet; they require him to think as well as to feel!” CHAPTER LV THE TORY WHIP Another poet who was frightened out of his wits by the French revolution was Robert Southey. But he took to respectability instead of to opium. He was born in 1774, the son of a linen draper. At the age of nineteen he was full of Rousseau, Goethe, and the “infidelity” of Gibbon. He was so keen for France that he wrote an epic about Joan of Arc; also he planned the “Pantisocracy” with Coleridge. But then he married the other sister, and was shocked by the Terror; a wealthy man gave him an annuity, and he settled down to write long and romantic poems about princes and conquerors, Celtic, Mexican, Arab, Indian--stage properties from all over the world, combined with standard British moralizing. In less than ten years we find Southey evolved into a pillar of reaction; at the age of thirty-three he received a pension from the government, and two years later he joined Walter Scott and Gifford as the literary whips of the Tory party. They published the “Quarterly Review,” and we shall see before long what they did to Byron, Shelley and Keats. At thirty-nine Southey became the laureate, and delivered the customary New Year’s ode in support of church and state; a procedure his biographer defends by explaining that he “was earning a provision for his girls.” It is of course a pleasant thing for a poet with many daughters to save up the purchase price of a husband for each; but what about the cotton spinners, whose ten-year-old daughters were working fourteen and sixteen hours a day in the mills, with the Tory squirarchy taxing the bread out of their mouths? For centuries the literary jackals who served the British ruling classes had starved in garrets; but now their services were beginning to be appreciated, and they were admitted to the class they defended. The diligent Southey wrote a “Naval Biography,” a hymn of praise to Britain’s sea-lords, and got five hundred pounds per volume for it, and established himself as England’s leading man of letters.