at the same time less cordial or
conciliating. He is less vain, or has less hope of pleasing, and therefore
lays himself less out to please. There is an air of condescension in his
civility. With a tall, loose figure, a peaked austerity of countenance,
and no inclination to _embonpoint_, you would say he has something
puritanical, something ascetic in his appearance. He answers to
Mandeville's description of Addison, "a parson in a tye-wig." He is not a
boon companion, nor does he indulge in the pleasures of the table, nor in
any other vice; nor are we aware that Mr. Southey is chargeable with any
human frailty but--_want of charity_! Having fewer errors to plead guilty
to, he is less lenient to those of others. He was born an age too late.
Had he lived a century or two ago, he would have been a happy as well as
blameless character. But the distraction of the time has unsettled him,
and the multiplicity of his pretensions have jostled with each other. No
man in our day (at least no man of genius) has led so uniformly and
entirely the life of a scholar from boyhood to the present hour, devoting
himself to learning with the enthusiasm of an early love, with the
severity and constancy of a religious vow--and well would it have been for
him if he had confined himself to this, and not undertaken to pull down or
to patch up the State! However irregular in his opinions, Mr. Southey is
constant, unremitting, mechanical in his studies, and the performance of
his duties. There is nothing Pindaric or Shandean here. In all the
relations and charities of private life, he is correct, exemplary,
generous, just. We never heard a single impropriety laid to his charge;
and if he has many enemies, few men can boast more numerous or stauncher
friends.--The variety and piquancy of his writings form a striking
contrast to the mode in which they are produced. He rises early, and
writes or reads till breakfast-time. He writes or reads after breakfast
till dinner, after dinner till tea, and from tea till bed-time--

"And follows so the ever-running year
With profitable labour to his grave.--"

on Derwent's banks, beneath the foot of Skiddaw. Study serves him for
business, exercise, recreation. He passes from verse to prose, from
history to poetry, from reading to writing, by a stop-watch. He writes a
fair hand without blots, sitting upright in his chair, leaves off when he
comes to the bottom of the page, and changes the subject for anothe