Rabelaisian freedom in playing with some of the enclosed incidents of our life. “All the greatest of poets,” he says, “have had a spice of Pantagruelism in their composition, which I verily believe was essential to their greatness.” But to take an extravagant fling in costume of a _sans-culotte_, and to play the part of “pander-general to the youth of Great Britain,” were different things. In his preface to _A Vision of Judgment_, Southey deplored the recent fall in the ethical spirit of English literature, “which for half a century had been distinguished for its moral purity,” and much of the guilt he laid on the leaders of “the Satanic School.” In the long-run the interests of art, as of all high endeavour, are invariably proved to be one with the interest of a nation’s morality. It had taken many lives of men to lift literature out of the beast. From prudential virtue and the lighter ethics of Addison it had risen to the grave moral dignity of Johnson, and from that to the impassioned spirituality of Wordsworth. Should all this be abandoned, and should literature now be permitted to reel back into the brute? We know that the title “Satanic School” struck home, that Byron was moved, and replied with brilliant play of wit in his _Vision of Judgment_. The laughers went over to Byron’s side. One who would be witty has certain advantages, if content to disregard honesty and good manners. To be witty was not Southey’s concern. “I saw,” he said, many years after, “that Byron was a man of quick impulses, strong passions, and great powers. I saw him abuse these powers; and, looking at the effect of his writings on the public mind, it was my duty to denounce such of them as aimed at the injury of morals and religion. This was all.” If continental critics find in what he set down a characteristic example of the bourgeois morality of England, we note with interest their point of view.[13]