whispers; no understanding but of his interest; no passion but his vanity. And yet they would persuade us that this non-entity is somebody—‘the chief dread of Jacobins and Jacobinism, or quacks and quackery.’ If so, Jacobins and Jacobinism have not much to fear; and Mr. Coleridge may publish as many Lay Sermons as he pleases. There is but one statement in the article in _The Courier_ to which we can heartily assent; it is Mr. Southey’s prediction of the fate of the French Revolution. ‘The Temple of Despotism,’ he said, ‘would be rebuilt, like that of the Mexican God, with human skulls, and cemented with human blood.’ He has lived to see this; to assist in the accomplishment of his prophecy, and to consecrate the spectre-building with pensioned hands! A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ., M.P. _from_ Robert Southey, _Esq._ John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. _Price_ 2_s._ _May 4, 1817._ This is very unlike Mr. Burke’s celebrated ‘Letter to the Duke of Bedford.’ The last is the only work of the Irish orator and patriot, in which he was in earnest, and all that he wanted was sincerity. The attack made upon his pension, by rousing his self-love, kindled his imagination, and made him blaze out in a torrent of fiery eloquence, in the course of which his tilting prose-Pegasus darted upon the titles of the noble duke like a thunderbolt, reversed his ancestral honours, overturned the monstrous straddle-legged figure of that legitimate monarch, Henry VIII., exploded the mines of the French revolution, kicked down the Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes full of constitutions, and only reposed from his whirling career, in that fine retrospect on himself, and the affecting episode to Admiral Keppel. Mr. Burke was an apostate, ‘a malignant renegado,’ like Mr. Southey; but there the comparison ends. He would not have been content, on such an occasion as the present, with _Mistering_ his opponent, and _Esquiring_ himself, like the ladies in the Beggar’s Opera, who express the height of their rankling envy and dislike, by calling each other—_Madam_. Mr. Southey’s self-love, when challenged to the lists, does not launch out into the wide field of wit or argument: it retires into its own littleness, collects all its slender resources in one poor effort of pert, pettifogging spite, makes up by studied malice for conscious impotence, and attempts to mortify others by the angry sense of his own insignificance. He grows tenacious of his ridiculous pretensions, in proportion as they are given up by every body else. His self-complacency riots, with a peculiar and pointed gusto, in the universal contempt or compassion of friends and foes. In the last stage of a galloping consumption, while the last expiring puff of _The Courier_ makes ‘a swan-like end,’ in a compliment to his opponents, he is sanguine of a deathless reputation—considers his soreness to the least touch as a