‘There is no other misrepresentation. The sentiments of the historical characters are correctly stated.’ [What, of the King, the Judge, and the Archbishop?] ‘Were I now to dramatize the same story, there would be much to add, but little to alter. I should not express those sentiments less strongly, but I should oppose to them more enlarged views of the nature of man and the progress of society. _I should set forth with equal force the oppressions of the feudal system, the excesses of the insurgents, and the treachery of the government_,’ [Doctors doubt that] ‘and hold up the errors and crimes which were then committed, as a warning _for this_ and for future generations. I should write _as a man; not as a stripling_; with the same heart, and the same desires, but with a ripened understanding and competent stores of knowledge,’ p. 15. Let him do it, but he dare not. He would shew by the attempt the hollowness of his boasted independence, the little time-serving meanness of his most enlarged views; in a word, that he has still the same understanding, but no longer the same heart. What are ‘the ripened discoveries and competent stores of knowledge’ which Mr. Southey would bring to this task? Are they the barefaced self-evident sophistries, the wretched shuffling evasions of common-sense and humanity which he contributes to the _Quarterly Review_, the cast-off, thread-bare, tattered excuses of Paley’s Moral Philosophy, and Windham’s hashed-up speeches? Why, all the prodigious discoveries which Mr. Southey there details with such dry significance, are familiar to every school-boy, are the common stock in trade of every spouter at a debating society, have been bandied about, hackneyed, exhausted any time these thirty years! And yet Mr. Southey was quite ignorant of them till very lately; they have broke upon him with a new and solemn light; they have come upon him by surprise, after three-and-twenty years; and at the last rebound, have overturned his tottering patriotism? Where is the use of Mr. Southey’s _regular scholastic education_, if he is to be thus ignorant at twenty, thus versatile at forty? The object of such an education is to make men less astonished at their own successive discoveries, by putting them in possession before-hand of what has been discovered by others. Mr. Southey cannot, like Mr. Cobbett, plead in extenuation of his change of sentiment, that he was a self-taught man, who had to grope his way from error and prejudice to truth and reason; neither can he plead like Mr. Cobbett, in proof of the sincerity of his motives, that he has suffered the loss of liberty and property by his change of opinion: Mr. Southey has suffered nothing by his—but a loss of character! A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ. M.P. _from_ Robert Southey, _Esq._ John Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 2_s._ (CONCLUDED.) _May 18, 1817._