But Southey could not rest. “I had rather leave off eating than poetizing,” he had said; and now the words seemed coming true, for he still poetized, and had almost ceased to eat. “Yesterday I finished _Madoc_, thank God! and thoroughly to my own satisfaction; but I have resolved on one great, laborious, and radical alteration. It was my design to identify Madoc with Mango Capac, the legislator of Peru: in this I have totally failed; therefore Mango Capac is to be the hero of another poem.” There is something charming in the logic of Southey’s “therefore;” so excellent an epic hero must not go to waste; but when, on the following morning, he rose early, it was to put on paper the first hundred lines, not of Mango Capac, but of the Dom Daniel poem which we know as _Thalaba_. A _Mohammed_, to be written in hexameters, was also on the stocks; and Coleridge had promised the half of this. Southey, who remembered a certain quarto volume on Pantisocracy and other great unwritten works, including the last—a Life of Lessing, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—knew the worth of his collaborateur’s promises. However, it matters little; “the only inconvenience that his dereliction can occasion will be that I shall write the poem in fragments, and have to seam them together at last.” “My Mohammed will be what I believe the Arabian was in the beginning of his career—sincere in enthusiasm; and it would puzzle a casuist to distinguish between the belief of inspiration and actual enthusiasm.” A short fragment of the _Mohammed_ was actually written by Coleridge, and a short fragment by Southey, which, dating from 1799, have an interest in connexion with the history of the English hexameter. Last among these many projects, Southey has made up his mind to undertake one great historical work—the History of Portugal. This was no dream-project; Mango Capac never descended from his father the Sun to appear in Southey’s poem; Mohammed never emerged from the cavern where the spider had spread his net; but the work which was meant to rival Gibbon’s great history was in part achieved. It is a fact more pathetic than many others which make appeal for tears, that this most ambitious and most cherished design of Southey’s life, conceived at the age of twenty-six, and kept constantly in view through all his days of toil, was not yet half wrought out when, forty years later, the pen dropped from his hand, and the worn-out brain could think no more.