ABSTRACT
Mr. William Smith, the Member for Norwich, whose liberal principles are well known, and acknowledged even by his opponents, is reported to have lately read in the House a passage from Mr. Southey’s poem of Wat Tyler, in which the rights of equality are strongly enforced; and then to have contrasted it with another quotation attributed to the same author, selected from a recent number of a periodical work, of a tendency directly opposite, and vehemently abusing those who still hold any of Mr. S.’s former opinions. At the end of six weeks from the commission of this offence, Mr. Southey issued forth a letter of vindication; in which, as he terms it, he purposes to treat ‘his calumniator with just and memorable severity.’ With regard to the passage from the periodical work, he endeavours to shelter himself from responsibility because that publication is anonymous, and report, which may be mistaken, is the only authority by which any particular paper can be 254attributed to one person or to another. This defence we should be inclined to allow in its full force, were not the antient and established rule of secrecy in periodical criticism now so much disregarded, and the names of the contributors to the publication in question circulated with every degree of notoriety. Mr. Southey must therefore be contented to take the consequences of the exposure which has been courted.—He enters into a laboured defence of his gradual change from ‘the political opinions which the French revolution scattered throughout Europe,’ to those which he now holds; and, in a strain of alternate defence and abuse, he remarks on the production which has created so much notice. This is surely unnecessary. Mr. Smith does not find fault with the work, nor with Mr. Southey for changing his political creed: but it is the virulence with which Mr. Southey visits those who differ from his present sentiments, and who avow opinions if not entirely, at least nearly, the same with those which he formerly professed, that has called forth the observation and excited the disgust not only of Mr. William Smith, but of every other moderate man.
