“I thank you for your note. Its information is of a kind to make one thoughtful; but the sorrow which I felt was not such as you were disposed to give me credit for.*
“I am sorry Lord Byron is dead, because some harm will arise from his death, and none was to be apprehended while he was living; for all the mischief which he was capable of doing he had done. Had he lived some years longer, he would either have continued in the same course, pandering to the basest passions and proclaiming the most flagitious principles, or he would have seen his errors and sung his palinodia,—perhaps have passed from the extreme of profligacy to some extreme of superstition. In the one case he would have been smothered in his own evil deeds. In the other he might have made some atonement for his offences.
“We shall now hear his praises from all quarters. I dare say he will be held up as a martyr to the cause of liberty, as having sacrificed his life by his exertions in behalf of the Greeks. Upon this score the liberals will beatify him; and even the better part of the public will for some time think it becoming in them to write those evil deeds of his in
* “You will, I do not doubt, consider his death as useful to the world; but do you not feel personal commiseration?”—H. T. to R. S., May 14. 1824. |
| Ætat. 50. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 179 |
“With regard to the thought that he has been cut off in his sins, mine is a charitable creed, and the more charitable it is the likelier it is to be true. God is merciful. Where there are the seeds of repentance in the heart, I doubt not but that they quicken in time for the individual, though it be too late for the world to perceive their growth. And if they be not there, length of days can produce no reformation.
“In return for your news I have nothing to communicate
except what relates to the operations of the desk. I am going to press with the
second volume of the Peninsular
War, after waiting till now in hope of obtaining some Spanish
accounts of the war in Catalonia, which it is now pretty well ascertained are
not to be found in Spain, though how they should have disappeared is altogether
inexplicable, unless the whole account of the books and their author, Francesco di
Olivares, given by a certain John
Mitford, some four or five years ago, in Colburn’s Magazine, is fictitious. I am reviewing Hayley’s Memoirs.
Hayley has been worried as
schoolboys worry a cat. I am treating him as a man deserves to be treated who
was in his time, by popular election, king of the English poets, who was,
moreover, a gentleman and a scholar, and a most kind-hearted and generous man,
in whose life there is something to blame, more to admire, and most of all
| 180 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 50. |
“Farewell, my dear Sir; and believe me,
