and, when he is compelled to appear in it in public, should try to get
through with the business as quickly and quietly as possible. The brawny
drayman who enacts the Champion of England in the Lord Mayor's show, is
in some danger of being sneered at by the spectators, even when he paces
along with the timidity and sobriety that becomes his condition; but if
he were to take it into his head to make serious boast of his prowess,
and to call upon the city bards to celebrate his heroic acts, the very
apprentices could not restrain their laughter,--and "the humorous man"
would have but small chance of finishing his part in peace.

Mr. Southey could not be ignorant of all this; and yet it appears that
he could not have known it all. He must have been conscious, we think,
of the ridicule attached to his office, and might have known that there
were only two ways of counteracting it,--either by sinking the office
altogether in his public appearances, or by writing such very good
verses in the discharge of it, as might defy ridicule, and render
neglect impossible. Instead of this, however, he has allowed himself to
write rather worse than any Laureate before him, and has betaken himself
to the luckless and vulgar expedient of endeavouring to face out the
thing by an air of prodigious confidence and assumption:--and has had
the usual fortune of such undertakers, by becoming only more
conspicuously ridiculous. The badness of his official productions indeed
is something really wonderful,--though not more so than the amazing
self-complacency and self-praise with which they are given to the world.
With the finest themes in the world for that sort of writing, they are
the dullest, tamest, and most tedious things ever poor critic was
condemned, or other people vainly invited, to read. They are a great
deal more wearisome, and rather more unmeaning and unnatural, than the
effusions of his predecessors, Messrs. Pye and Whitehead; and are
moreover disfigured with the most abominable egotism, conceit and