The Project Gutenberg eBook, Colloquies on Society, by Robert Southey,
Edited by Henry Morley

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Title: Colloquies on Society

Author: Robert Southey

Editor: Henry Morley

Release Date: May 8, 2007 [eBook #4243]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY***

Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell and Company edition by David Price,
email: ccx074@pglaf.org

COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY.

BY
ROBERT SOUTHEY.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1887.

INTRODUCTION.

It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published "Sir
Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society," a
book in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery. There
were later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there was an
edition in one volume in 1837, at the beginning of the reign of Queen
Victoria.

These dialogues with a meditative and patriotic ghost form separate
dissertations upon various questions that concern the progress of
society. Omitting a few dissertations that have lost the interest they
had when the subjects they discussed were burning questions of the time,
this volume retains the whole machinery of Southey's book. It gives
unabridged the Colloquies that deal with the main principles of social
life as Southey saw them in his latter days; and it includes, of course,
the pleasant Colloquy that presents to us Southey himself, happy in his
library, descanting on the course of time as illustrated by the bodies
and the souls of books. As this volume does not reproduce all the
Colloquies arranged by Southey under the main title of "Sir Thomas More,"
it avoids use of the main title, and ventures only to describe itself as
"Colloquies on Society, by Robert Southey."

They are of great interest, for they present to us the form and character
of the conservative reaction in a mind that was in youth impatient for
reform. In Southey, as in Wordsworth, the reaction followed on
experience of failure in the way taken by the revolutionists of France,
with whose aims for the regen