onger disdains the almost indispensable aid
to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better
than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be,
and many other passages are not far below it; but to the general taste
the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not
generally and humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail.

To get out of the difficulty thus presented by indulging in contemptuous
ignoring of Southey's merits has been attempted many times since Emerson
foolishly asked "Who is Southey?" in his jottings of his conversation
with Landor, Southey's most dissimilar but constant friend and
panegyrist. It is extremely easy to say who Southey is. He is the
possessor of perhaps the purest and most perfect English prose style, of
a kind at once simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has
written (in the _Life of Nelson_) perhaps the best short biography in
that language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman has
ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent comprehension
and memory of what he read. Unlike many book-worms, he had an
exceedingly lively and active humour. He has scarcely an equal, and
certainly no superior, in the rare and difficult art of discerning and
ranging the material parts of an historical account: the pedant may
glean, but the true historian will rarely reap after him. And in poetry
his gifts, if they are never of the very highest, are so various and
often so high that it is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet.
The man who could write the verses "In my Library" and the best parts of
_Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ certainly had it in his power to write other
things as good, probably to write other things better. Had it been in
his nature to take no thought not merely for the morrow but even for the
day, like Coleridge, or in his fate to be provided for without any
trouble on his own part, and to take the provision with self-centred
indifference, like Wordsworth, his actual production might have been
different and better. But his strenuous and generous nature could not be
idle; and idleness of some sort is, it may be very seriously laid down,
absolutely necessary to the poet who is to be supreme.

The poet who, though, according to the canons of poetical criticism most
in favour during this century, he ranks lower than either Wordsworth or
Coleridge, did far more to popularise the