decline to
officiate."

His aversion to every form of what is called patronage of
literature[292] was part of the same feeling. A few months earlier a
Manchester gentleman[293] wrote for his support to such a scheme. "I beg
to be excused," was his reply, "from complying with the request you do
me the honour to prefer, simply because I hold the opinion that there is
a great deal too much patronage in England. The better the design, the
less (as I think) should it seek such adventitious aid, and the more
composedly should it rest on its own merits." This was the belief
Southey held; it extended to the support by way of patronage given by
such societies as the Literary Fund, which Southey also strongly
resisted; and it survived the failure of the Guild whereby it was hoped
to establish a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary
pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give. Though there was no
project of his life into which he flung himself with greater eagerness
than the Guild, it was not taken up by the class it was meant to
benefit, and every renewed exertion more largely added to the failure.
There is no room in these pages for the story, which will add its
chapter some day to the vanity of human wishes; but a passage from a
letter to Bulwer Lytton at its outset will be some measure of the height
from which the writer fell, when all hope for what he had so set his
heart upon ceased. "I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried by the
support which I trust will be given to it, will change the status of the
literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no
government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have
implicit confidence in the scheme--so splendidly begun--if we carry it
out with a stedfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in
our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come,
and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring
benefactor. . . . Oh what a procession of new years may walk out of all
this for the class we belong to, after we are dust."

These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the
clamour with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously small.
"You read that life of Clare?" he wrote (15th of August 1865). "Did you
ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isn't it
expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as _the Poet_? So
another Incompet