‘And we are strongly persuaded that the indignation which, in his early perusal of our history, the outrage on _Wat Tyler’s_ Daughter had kindled within him, was the circumstance that recommended the story to his choice for the first powerful exercise of his dramatic powers. It is this, too, we doubt not, that coloured and shaped his feelings during the whole composition of the drama. “Through the allegiance and just fealty Which he did owe unto all womankind.”’ Mr. Coleridge might as well tell us that the Laureate wrote _Wat Tyler_ as an Epithalamium on his own marriage. There is but one line on the subject from the beginning to the end. No; it is not Mr. Southey’s way to say nothing on the subject on which he writes. If this were the main drift and secret spring of the poem, why does Mr. Southey wish to retract it now? Has he been taught by his present fashionable associates to laugh at Edmund Spenser, the darling of the _boy_ Southey, to abjure ‘his allegiance and just fealty to all womankind,’ and to look upon ‘rapes and ravishments’ as ‘exaggerated evils,’ the product of an idle imagination, exciting a pleasurable fervour at the time, and signifying nothing afterwards? Is the outrage upon _Wat Tyler’s_ Daughter the only evil in history, or in the poem itself, which ought to inflame the virtuous indignation of the full-grown stripling bard? Are all the other oppressions recorded in the annals of the world nothing but ‘horrible shadows, unreal mockeries,’ that this alone should live ‘within the book and volume of his brain unmixed with baser matter’? Or has Mr. Southey, the historian and the politician, at last discovered, that even this evil, the greatest and the only evil in the world, and not a mere illusion of his boyish imagination, is itself a bagatelle, compared with the blessings of the poll-tax, feudal vassalage, popery, and slavery, the attempt to put down which by murder, insurrection, and treason, in the reign of Richard II. the poet-laureate once celebrated _con amore_ in ‘the _Wat Tyler_‘?—In courtly malice and servility Mr. Southey has outdone Herodias’s daughter. He marches into Chancery ‘with his own head in a charger,’ as an offering to Royal delicacy. He plucks out the heart of Liberty within him, and mangles his own breast to stifle every natural sentiment left there: and yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this stuffed figure, this wretched phantom, is the living man. The finery of birth-day suits has dazzled his senses, so that he has ‘no speculation in those eyes that he does glare with’; yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us that this is the clear-sighted politician. Famine stares him in the face, and he looks upon her with lack-lustre eye. Despotism hovers over him, and he says, ‘Come, let me clutch thee.’ He drinks the cup of human misery, and thinks it is a cup of sack. He has no feeling left, but of ‘tickling commodity’; no ears but for court