The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
with him: but why did he become stationary then? Has nothing happened in
the three last years,—nothing—to make Mr. Southey retreat back to some
of his old opinions, as he had advanced from them, guided, as he
professes to be in his undeviating course, by facts and experience? Are
the actual events of the last three years nothing in the scale of Mr.
Southey’s judgment? Is not their weight overpowering, irresistible?
What, do not the names of Poland, Norway, Finland, Saxony, Italy, Spain
and Portugal, the Pope, the Inquisition, and the Cortes (to say nothing
of France, Nismes, and the Bourbons) thrown into the scale of common
sense and common honesty, dash it down, with a startling sound, upon the
counter, where Mr. Southey is reckoning his well-gotten gains, the price
of his disinterested exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty and the
deliverance of mankind, making his hair stand on end at his own folly
and credulity, and forcing him indignantly to fling his last year’s
pension and the arrears of the Quarterly in the face of Mr. Murray’s
shopmen and the clerks of the Treasury, and swear, ‘in disregard of all
worldly considerations,’ never to set his foot in Downing or
Albemarle-street again? No such thing. In advocating the cause of the
French people, Mr. Southey’s principles and his interest were at
variance, and therefore he quitted his principles when he saw a good
opportunity: in taking up the cause of the Allies, his principles and
his interest became united and thenceforth indissoluble. His engagement
to his first love, the Republic, was only upon liking; his marriage to
Legitimacy is _for better, for worse_, and nothing but death shall part
them. Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin mistress,
who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, who ‘found him poor
and kept him so,’ by her prudish notions of virtue. He divorced her, in
short, for nothing but the spirit and success with which she resisted
the fraud and force to which the old bawd Legitimacy was forever
resorting to overpower her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a
virago, a cunning gipsey, always in broils about her honour and the
inviolability of her person, and always getting the better in them,
furiously scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the
said pimping old lady, who would never let her alone, night or day. But
since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable old hag
tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keeping of the Allied
Sovereigns, Mr. Southey has devoted himself to her more fortunate and
wealthy rival: he is become uxorious in his second matrimonial
connexion; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a
foul, ugly witch, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping,
rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing
steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her ends—bringing famine, pestilence,
and death in her train—infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the
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