At his death Thomas Warton, the senior of two poetic brothers, whom Hazlitt says was studious with ease and learned without affectation, reclaimed the position from the contempt in which it had been so long held. He achieved what should satisfy the aspiration of any man successfully challenging the public taste that had been the slave of the didactic school of poetry under Pope, imparting a love for the poetry of nature and the literary style of the Old English masters who lived out of doors. It is hard to think that at his death the laureateship sank lower than ever. It is humiliating to record that for a quarter of a century Henry James Pye bore the honors, ushering out the eighteenth and ushering in the nineteenth century, a man of whom Byron expressed the universal disdain when he wrote: “What! What! Pye come again? No more, no more of that.” Three names grace the laureate record of the past seventy years, names of pioneers, each rapturously praised by admirers, and as violently condemned by critics—Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson. Taine, our racy French critic, places Southey in the first rank of his class of poets, a clever man, an indefatigable reader, inexhaustible writer, crammed with erudition, gifted in imagination, gifted like Victor Hugo for the freshness of his annotations and splendor of his picturesque curiosity. De Quincy criticises him as being too intensely objective, with too little exhibit of the mind as introverting upon its own thought and feelings. He is distinguished at once for his unwearying attacks upon the institutions of which the natural Englishman is proud. This is readily accounted for from the fact that at fourteen he was disgraced at Westminster school for writing a sarcastic article on corporal punishment, for which the publisher was prosecuted by the head-master, and that at Oxford University, where he took a partial course, he was annoyed by the exasperations of financial infelicities preventing high rank, and ultimately forcing him away from scholastic privileges. As a critic, historian and antiquarian Southey held high rank among the scholars of the land, and yet he acquired his scholarly taste and vast learning by out of school studies. He was preëminently one of those curious creatures of circumstance who are such because they have the tact to make unpromising events serve them. He was too active a democrat to hope for court favors, and too closely allied with the Unitarians to venture within the church, and therefore happily fell into association with Coleridge and his coterie. At the time Coleridge was scheming as a high-toned communist to send a colony to America to found a model, impracticable republic on the banks of the Susquehanna, from which all selfishness was to be banished, and Southey, at eighteen, attempted to raise money for that object, failing in which he was frequently a penniless youth.