Great writers in our country have frequently stirred
difficult questions in religion and life, and then seemed to be half
scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by the reverberation of their own voices.
Shelley almost alone was always ready to declare, "I meant what I said,
and stand to it."
Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the Thirty-Nine
Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following month (October
1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of
their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George
III. The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his
numerous literary duels, of which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a
well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt. It
does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor
to compel our respect for the author of the _Life of Nelson_, and the
open-handed friend of Coleridge; nor is it any disparagement that, with
the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle life changed his
political and other opinions.
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