and fourth delivery which you had the power of taking, I made up a memorandum, as accurately as I could do, living in the country, in bad health, and without access to all the necessary documents, of the sales of the book from its becoming the property of my house in 1812, and it amounted to £60,000. We cannot have had less than a profit of £20,000 on these sales; we shall not, I think, under any circumstances, get less than £10,000 at the final close of the present impression; and we have the copyright free. In 1812, when the copartnery was formed with Mr Bonar, the copyright was valued at £11,000; we have since laid out £1000 improving it, which makes £12,000; and at this time there was no supplement to carry it through, nor did we know what success the book was to meet with in the new hands into which it had just come. The completion of 'Rees,' and two or three bad years after the war, have all operated against us; but the state of the book has been kept pure, and has been only in our hands and yours since the unlucky days of Fenner, on whose estate, after all, considering that we got about £40,000 of his money, our ranking was not an immense sum, and our ultimate loss will not be great. The supplement has surely a present value-that is, for the volumes yet to come out and it will supply materials for at least an equal number of volumes of a new edition. You have not, I presume, lost sight of the profit I would expect to make by the sets of the twenty volumes; and upon the whole, I daresay, you will now be disposed to allow that to us, who know its value so well, the two properties will be worth what I estimated them at. We shall make from £20,000 to £30,000 by the first edition of the supplement, and this we owe to being the proprietors of the greater work; but there has been another value connected with this property: it enabled us to pay large sums to deceased partners, which, without such a powerful magnet, might have been very difficult, if not impossible." The "Encyclopædia Britannica" passed into the hands of Messrs A. & C. Black, in the year 1826. The seventh edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" was commenced in 1827, and completed in 1842. It was edited by Mr Macvey Napier, Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh, who was assisted in the greater part of the work by Dr James Browne as sub-editor. Browne had been trained as an advocate at the Scottish bar, but relinquished law in favour of literature. He was also at this time editor of the Caledonian Mercury. The total expense of the twenty-one quarto volumes was, in a trial in the Jury Court of Scotland, proved to have been no less a sum than £125,667, 9s. 3d. Nine years later, in 1852, the eighth edition was commenced, under the editorship of Dr Thomas Stuart Traill, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in the Uni versity of Edinburgh, who was assisted for some time by his son, Mr Thomas Stuart Traill, and after his death by the late Mr John Downes, A. M., and others whose names are commemorated in the preface. The eighth edition was completed in 1860. Both editions extended to twenty-one volumes quarto, and met with considerable success. Since the completion of the eighth edition, so many changes have taken place in all departments of knowledge, that it has been thought advisable to prepare for the publication of a ninth edition, the editorial charge of which has been intrusted to Mr Thomas Spencer Baynes, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of St Andrews. A work of such magnitude, and comprising such multitudinous details, must necessarily occupy a considerable time in preparation, and it is now in course of publication. So far as the prospects of the forthcoming edition are concerned, judging from the talents of the editor, and his peculiar fitness for the work, it is expected that it will surpass in intrinsic merit and systematic treatment all its predecessors. It is being compiled on the same principle as the former editions, viz., that of employing the best writers for all important subjects, so as to maintain its character as a repository of original writings, stamped with the authority of the authors' names. "Troth," said Scott, "if you live you are indeed likely to be "The great Napoleon of the realms of print."" "If you outlive me," replied Constable, "I bespeak that line for my tombstone. a three shilling or half-a-crown volume every month, which must and shall sell, not by thousands or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands-ay, by millions! Twelve volumes in the year, a halfpenny of profit on every copy of which will make me richer than the possession of all the copyrights of all the quartos that ever were, or ever will be, hot-pressed! Twelve volumes so good that millions must wish to have them, and so cheap that every butcher's callant may have them if he pleases to let me tax him sixpence a week." The failure of Constable & Co. in January 1826 interrupted this scheme for a time, until in 1827 the proposed Miscellany was inaugur ated with Captain Basil Hall's "Voyages." The author had kindly presented this work to the publisher, who, just as his prospects were brightening, died on the 21st July of the same year. The Scotsman of January 6, 1827, expressed itself thus regarding the prospects of literature at that time, suggested by the issue of Constable's Miscellany. These remarks seem as pertinent now as when they were first made: project is, that the principle of progressive and periodical publication, which has so many advantages, but has hitherto been applied only to a few old standard books, to ephemeral discussions, and summaries of science, is rendered applicable to the great floating mass of our literature, and thus furnishes a prodigious engine for the diffusion of every species of useful and ornamental knowledge through the lower and middle classes of society. We anticipate one further, and, in our opinion, very great advantage, from the establishment of such publications. Generally speaking, at present, books are esteemed by all persons in the middle and lower ranks as something of the nature of luxuries or superfluities. They are something which it is very convenient and pleasant to have, but which can quite well be wanted. Casual circumstances make an individual lay out half-a-guinea or a guinea, at a rare juncture, upon some volume which strikes his fancy; but no man (a professed collector excepted) sets apart a portion of his income to buy books, as he does to buy food, clothes, or furniture. Now, it occurs to us that when three or four of the great publishing book "To estimate what may be the effect of this class of works, let us look to the recent changes in our literature. There are two species of publications which have given a new impulse to thought, and prodigiously accelerated the progress of knowledge within the last sixty yearswe mean encyclopædias and reviews which deal in discussion. Both of these owe some portion of their usefulness to a circumstance common to all periodicals-that, coming out in parts, they neither press heavily on the time nor the purse, and are thus within the reach of multitudes in the middle and lower walks of society. The former made scientific knowledge and general information more widely accessible; the latter familiarised the people with the principles of philosophy, and taught them to take compre-sellers have commenced their miscellanies, and hensive views of passing events and of their own situation. But both from their nature are subject to restrictions. The one can take in no article which exceeds thirty or forty octavo pages, and excludes some species of reading altogether; the other, being compelled by its plan to embrace many subjects which nobody cares for, can assign but a small space to others which are far more attractive. A life of Washington or Nelson in two volumes, a 'History of India' in three volumes, a 'Narrative of Hall's Voyages' of a similar size, could find admission into neither. Yet many readers will deem these as interesting and profitable as anything in the pages of a review, and for ninetynine in a hundred they are infinitely more attractive than a long treatise on botany, mineralogy, or the genus mammalia. An encyclopædia is a work three-fourths of which are necessarily useless to its possessor; but in a miscellany, fettered by no system in the compiling, nine parts in ten will have a value to every reader. Of our modern magazines, filled up with flash and flummery, it is needless to speak. They sparkle like champagne at the moment of decanting, but are so stale and vapid one month after they issue from the press, that no man out of his dotage ever opens them a second time. An encyclopædia in twenty volumes costs forty pounds; and, for the same sum, those who subscribe for a miscellany of this kind, will have a library of 266 volumes, in every one of which an ordinary reader will find instruction or rational amusement. In short, the great merit of this have thus broken down the mass of our mental aliment (as chandlers do our corporeal food) into portions for daily and weekly consumption, literature will take its rank among the necessaries of life, and a library will be considered as it ought to be by every man in decent circumstances-an indispensable part of household furniture. Few persons would want a collection of books, if one adapted to their tastes and habits could be procured by laying out a shilling weekly. But we hesitate when £2, 12s. are to be expended in buying only two quartos or four octavos-first, because so large a sum as 13s. to 26s. can ill be spared at once; secondly, because, when books are at such a price, we despair of forming a useful collection; and, thirdly, that as we cannot get what we would wish, we find few single volumes so tempting as to break through our habit, and put our hands in our pockets. But things will be greatly changed when the 52s. which buys only four volumes at present, perhaps on one single subject, will buy seventeen volumes of equal size as to reading, and embracing a great variety of instructive or interesting matter. In a few years, we predict that every young man, when his apprenticeship is done, will lay aside a shilling weekly for books-that a young couple taking up house will reckon thirty or forty volumes of Constable's Miscellany as indispensable as a chest of drawers, or an eight-day clock-and that the question "Who is your bookseller?' will be as pertinent in every decent family as Who is your grocer' or clothier?'" ROBERT SOUTHEY. [1774-1843.] BY WILLIAM HAZLITT. [ROBERT SOUTHEY may be said to have spent one of the most honourable and industrious of lives devoted to literature which we have on record. With unceasing application, he was in private life sincere and generous. The only human frailty which Hazlitt, whom we quote, could discover in him, was political inconsistency and want of charity. Perhaps this judgment also argued a want of charity on the part of the critic who made it. The eldest surviving son of a Bristol linendraper, he was born in that town in August 1774. His earliest years were spent with an aunt, Miss Tyler, of Bath; this lady was somewhat eccentric in her habits, and passionately fond of the theatre. After attending three schools in succession, he was sent to Westminster School, from which he was dismissed in 1792. He had been identified with a periodical called the Flagellant, contributing to it an article on corporal punishment, which had so incensed the head-master that he was accordingly dismissed from school. His father died about this time, and his affairs being embarrassed, an uncle befriended young Southey; he was entered as a student at Balliol College. Embracing what were called the liberal opinions abroad at the time, he went to an extreme in his expressions of them. He worked hard and read a great deal while there, and wrote an enormous quantity of verse, which was torn up and burned. His views preventing him from entering the Church, he was ready to embrace any Utopian scheme which might offer. He and a young Quaker, Richard Lovell, and Coleridge had each been united to members of the Fricker family of Bristol; it was their intention at this time to emigrate to North America, where they would found what was called a "Pantisocracy." Want of funds paralysed this scheme, and Southey for a time supported himself by lecturing on history. Cottle, the Bristol publisher, gave him fifty guineas for his poem "Joan of Arc." He accompanied his uncle, Mr Hill, at this time, to Portugal, which introduced him to a knowledge of the language and literature of Spain and Portugal. On his return he studied law; in 1801 he became private secretary to Mr Corry, with a salary of £350 a year. This post he held six months. In 1804 he settled at Greta Hall, near Keswick, in Cumberland, where he remained for forty years. Coleridge Coleridge's connection with this scheme is discussed ante, p. 143. and his family were staying there at the time, and Wordsworth at Rydal, near Ambleside, about fourteen miles distant. Coleridge left Keswick in September 1803, leaving his wife and children to Southey's care and keeping. At this time Southey's political opinions underwent a violent change, and became decidedly Conservative. A sentence from one of his letters will show how unweariedly industrious he was. "My actions are as regular as those of St Dunstan's quarter-boys. Three pages of history" (of Portugal) "after breakfast (equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to transcribe and copy for the press, or to make my selections and biographies" (for "Specimens of the English Poets"), "or what else suits my humour, till dinner-time; from dinner-time till tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta. After tea, I go to poetry" (he was now writing the "Curse of Kehama"), "and correct, and re-write, and copy till I am tired, and then turn to anything else to supper. And this is my life." He produced above a hundred volumes of various sizes, and over a hundred papers upon history, biography, politics, morals, and general literature, for the Quarterly Review. He wrote the historical portion of the Edinburgh Annual Register for some years, and also contributed to the Critical Review, and the Foreign Quarterly. His reading was at all times extensive, and he was a regular correspondent. In 1807 a pension, which amounted to £160 a year, was bestowed upon him for literary service. In November 1813 he was appointed poet laureate on the death of Pye. In 1821 he received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Oxford. A pension of £300 a year was bestowed upon him by the Government of Sir Robert Peel. A baronetcy was also proferred to him, but this was declined. His first wife died in 1837; he married again on 4th June 1839, with Miss Caroline Bowles, the poetess. Southey after this time gradually sank into mental imbecility, from which death released him on March 21, 1843. He left a son and three daughters. His library, one of the best of its kind in the kingdom, was disposed of in London by public auction. Southey's poetry, much of which was very popular when published, is now little known, and less read by the present generation of readers, but his lives of Nelson and of Wesley have been universally read and admired. These brief biographical details may perhaps serve to introduce a notice of this excellent man by one of his contemporaries.] He can Mr Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected-it was the look that had been impressed upon his face by the events that marked the outset of his life, it was the dawn of liberty that still tinged his cheek, a smile betwixt hope and sadness that still played upon his quivering lip. Mr Southey's mind is essentially sanguine, even to over-weeningness. It is prophetic of good; it cordially embraces it; it casts a longing, lingering look after it, even when it is gone for ever. not bear to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his fellow-man, when all else despair. It is the very element, "where he must live or have no life at all." While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul (and long after, it was ⚫ seen reflected on his brow, like the light of setting suns on the peak of some high mountain, or lonely range of clouds, floating in purer ether!), while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with child-like simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover, he was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world-in his impatience of the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause. But when he once believed, after many staggering doubts and painful struggles, that this was no longer possible, when his chimeras and golden dreams of human perfectibility vanished from him, he turned suddenly round, and maintained that "whatever is, is right." Mr Southey has not fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature of things. His irritable sense rejects the alternative altogether, as a weak stomach rejects the food that is distasteful to it. He hopes on against hope, he believes in all unbelief. He must either repose on actual or on imaginary good. He missed his way in Utopia, he has found it at Old Sarum "His generous ardour no cold medium knows;" his eagerness admits of no doubt or delay. is ever in extremes, and ever in the wrong. He The reason is, that not truth, but self-opinion is the ruling principle of Mr Southey's mind. The charm of novelty, the applause of the multitude, the sanction of power, the venerableness of antiquity, pique, resentment, the spirit of contradiction, have a good deal to do with his preferences. His inquiries are partial and hasty; his conclusions raw and unconcocted, and with a considerable infusion of whim and humour and a monkish spleen. His opinions are like certain wines, warm and generous when new; but they will not keep, and soon turn flat or sour, for want of a stronger spirit of the understanding to give a body to them. He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy. "A wilful man," according to the Scotch proverb, "must have his way." If it were the cause to which he was sincerely attached, he would adhere to it through good report and evil report; but it is himself to whom he does homage, and would have others do so; and he therefore changes sides, rather than submit to apparent defeat or temporary mortification. Abstract principle has no rule but the understood distinction between right and wrong; the indulgence of vanity, of caprice, or prejudice is regulated by the convenience or bias of the moment. The temperament of our politician's mind is poetical, not philosophical. He is more the creature of impulse, than he is of reflection. He invents the unreal, he embellishes the false with the glosses of fancy, but pays little attention to "the words of truth and soberness. His impressions are accidental, immediate, personal, instead of being permanent and universal. Of all mortals he is surely the most impatient of contradiction, even when he has completely turned the tables on himself. Is not this very inconsistency the reason? Is he not tenacious of his opinions, in proportion as they are brittle and hastily formed? Is he not jealous of the grounds of his belief, because he fears they will not bear inspection, or is conscious he has shifted them? Does he not confine others to the strict line of orthodoxy, because he has himself taken every liberty? Is he not afraid to look to the right or the left, lest he should see the ghosts of his former extravagances staring him in the face? Does he not refuse to tolerate the smallest shade of difference in others, because he feels that he wants the utmost latitude of construction for differing so widely from himself? Is he not captious, dogmatical, petulant in delivering his sentiments, according as he has been inconsistent, rash, and fanciful in adopting them? He maintains that there can be no possible ground for differing from him, because he looks only at his own side of the question! He sets up his own favourite notions as the standard of reason and honesty, because he has changed from one extreme to another! He treats his opponents with contempt, because he is him. self afraid of meeting with disrespect! He says that "a Reformer is a worse character than a housebreaker," in order to stifle the recollection that he himself once was one! We must say that "we relish Mr Southey more in the Reformer" than in his lately acquired, but by no means natural or becoming character of poet laureate and courtier. He may rest assured that a garland of wild-flowers suits him better than the laureate-wreath: that his pastoral odes and popular inscriptions were far more adapted to his genius than his presentation poems. He is nothing akin to birthday suits and drawing-room fopperies. "He is nothing, if not fantastical." In his figure, in his movements, in his sentiments, he is sharp and angular, quaint and eccentric. Mr Southey is not of the court, courtly. Everything of him and about him is from the people. He is not classical, he is not legitimate. He is not a man cast in the mould of other men's opinions; he is not shaped on any model; he bows to no authority; he yields only to his own wayward peculiarities. He is wild, irregular, singular, extreme. He is no formalist, not he! All is crude and chaotic, self-opinionated, vain. He wants proportion, keeping, system, standard rules. He is not teres et rotundus. Mr Southey walks with his chin erect through the streets of London, and with an umbrella sticking out under his arm, in the finest weather. He has not sacrificed to the Graces, nor studied decorum. With him everything is projecting, starting from its place, an episode, a digression, a poetic licence. He does not move in any given orbit, but, like a falling star, shoots from his sphere. He is pragmatical, restless, unfixed, full of experiments, beginning everything anew, wiser than his betters, judging for himself, dictating to others. He is decidedly revolutionary. He may have given up the reform of the State; but depend upon it, he has some other hobby of the same kind. Does he not dedicate to his present Majesty that extraordinary poem on the death of his father, called the "Vision of Judgment," "# as a specimen of what might be done in English hexameters? In a court poem all should be trite and on an approved model. He might as well have presented himself at the levée in a fancy or masquerade dress. Mr Southey was not to try conclusions with majesty-still less on such an occasion. The extreme freedoms with departed greatness, the party petulance carried to the throne of grace, the unchecked indulgence of private humour, the assumption of infallibility and even of the voice of Heaven in this poem, are pointed instances of what we have said. They show the singular state of over-excitement of Mr Southey's mind, and the force of old habits of independent and unbridled thinking, which cannot be kept down even in addressing his sovereign! Look at Mr Southey's larger poems, his "Kehama," his "Thalaba," his "Madoc," his "Roderic." Who will deny the spirit, the scope, the splendid imagery, the Now only remembered by Byron's merciless satire and parody, published under the same title. hurried and startling interest that pervades them? Who will say that they are not sustained on fictions wilder than his own Glendoveer, that they are not the daring creations of a mind curbed by no law, tamed by no fear, that they are not rather like the trances than the waking dreams of genius, that they are not the very paradoxes of poetry? All this is very well, very intelligible, and very harmless, if we regard the rank excrescences of Mr Southey's poetry, like the red and blue flowers in corn, as the unweeded growth of a luxuriant and wandering fancy; or if we allow the yeasty workings of an ardent spirit to ferment and boil over-the variety, the boldness, the lively stimulus given to the mind may then atone for the violation of rules and the offences to bed-rid authority; but not if our poetic libertine sets up for a lawgiver and judge, or an apprehender of vagrants in the regions either of taste or opinion. Our motley gentleman deserves the strait-waistcoat, if he is for setting others in the stocks of servility, or condemning them to the pillory for a new mode of rhyme or reason. Or if a composer of sacred dramas on classic models, or a translator of an old Latin author (that will hardly bear translation) or a vamper-up of vapid cantos and odes set to music, were to turn pander to prescription and palliater of every dull, incorrigible abuse, it would not be much to be wondered at or even regretted. But in Mr Southey it was a lamentable falling off. It is indeed to be deplored, it is a stain on genius, a blow to humanity, that the author of "Joan of Arc"-that work in which the love of liberty is exhaled like the breath of spring, mild, balmy, heaven-born, that is full of tears and virgin sighs, and yearnings of affection after truth and good, gushing warm and crimsoned from the heart-should ever after turn to folly, or become the advocate of a rotten cause. After giving up his heart to that subject, he ought not (whatever others might do) ever to have set his foot within the threshold of a court. He might be sure that he would not gain forgiveness or favour by it, nor obtain a single cordial smile from greatness. All that Mr Southey is or that he does best, is independent, spontaneous, free as the vital air he draws-when he affects the courtier or the sophist, he is obliged to put a constraint upon himself, to hold in his breath, he loses his genius, and offers a violence to his nature. His characteristic faults are the excess of a lively, unguarded temperament - oh! let them not degenerate into cold-blooded, heartless vices! If we speak or have ever spoken of Mr Southey with severity, it is with "the malice of old friends," for we count ourselves among his sincerest and heartiest well-wishers. But while he himself is anomalous, incalculable, eccentric, from youth to age (the "Wat Tyler" and the "Vision of Judgment" are the alpha and omega of his disjointed career), full of sallies of humour, |