. I
filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank
off at once, and left him to that end of his wretchedness which could
not be far distant.'"

"I hope (concludes Mr Southey), I have always felt and expressed an
honest and Christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce
them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of
this authentic picture."

Mr Southey, in his subsequent lives of conquerors, and his other
writings, will hardly be thought to have acted up to this "abhorrence of
wars, and of the systems that produce them." Nor is he to be blamed for
qualifying his view of the subject, equally blameless (surely) as they
are to be held who have retained their old views, especially by him who
helped to impress them. His friend Mr Wordsworth, in the vivacity of his
admonitions to hasty complaints of evil, has gone so far as to say that
"Carnage is God's daughter," and thereby subjected himself to the
scoffs of a late noble wit. He is addressing the Deity himself:--

"But thy most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man, array'd for mutual slaughter:
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter."

Mr Wordsworth is a great poet and a philosophical thinker, in spite of
his having here paid a tremendous compliment to a rhyme (for
unquestionably the word "slaughter" provoked him into that imperative
"Yea," and its subsequent venturous affiliation); but the judgment, to
say no more of it, is rash. Whatever the Divine Being intends, by his
permission or use of evil, it becomes us to think the best of it; but
not to affirm the appropriation of the particulars to him under their
worst appellation, seeing that he has implanted in us a horror of them,
and a wish to do them away. What it is right in him to do, is one
thing; what it is proper in us to affirm that he actually does, is
another. And, above all, it is idle to affirm what he intends to do for
ever, and to have us eternally venerate and abstain from questioning an
evil. All good and evil, and vice and virtue themselves, might become
confounded in the human mind by a like daring; and humanity sit down
under every buffet of misfortune, without attempting to resist it:
which, fortunately, is impossible. Plato cut this knotty point better,
by regarding evil as a thing senseless and unmalignant (indeed no
philosopher regards anything as malignant, or malignant for malignity