flights of poetry. He is often puerile, diffuse, and artificial, and
seems to have but little acquaintance with those chaster and severer
graces, by whom the epic muse would be most suitably attended. His
faults are always aggravated, and often created, by his partiality for
the peculiar manner of that new school of poetry, of which he is a
faithful disciple, and to the glory of which he has sacrificed greater
talents and acquisitions, than can be boasted of by any of his
associates.



ON SOUTHEY'S LAUREATE LAYS

[From _The Edinburgh Review_, June, 1816]

_The Lay of the Laureate. Carmen Nuptiale_. By ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esq.,
Poet Laureate, &c., &c. 12mo. pp. 78. London, 1816.


A poet laureate, we take it, is naturally a ridiculous person: and has
scarcely any safe course to follow, in times like the present, but to
bear his faculties with exceeding meekness, and to keep as much as
possible in the shade. A stipendiary officer of the Royal household,
bound to produce two lyrical compositions ever year, in praise of his
Majesty's person and government, is undoubtedly an object which it is
difficult to contemplate with gravity; and which can only have been
retained in existence, from that love of antique pomp and establishment
which has embellished our Court with so many gold-sticks and white rods,
and such trains of beef-eaters and grooms of the stole--though it has
submitted to the suppression of the more sprightly appendages of a