After a voyage to the East Indies, he established himself in business. This was the most interesting crisis of his life. He had just entered upon his career of usefulness-be had just begun to recompense, by his irreproachable conduct, the solicitudes of parental love he had just begun to realize, as a man, the fond anticipations of his youth, when he was seized by a fatal fever, which, in a few days, consigned him to the grave.

To give his character in a few words: We would say integrity was the ruling principle of his life; and this invaluable quality was rendered amiable and attractive by a sense of honour as delicate as it was correct. Possessed of a mild and amiable disposition, he was candid, charitable, generous, and sincere. These various qualities were, moreover, impelled and directed to their proper objects by a predominating sense of justice.

In the interesting relations of a son and brother, he was uniformly dutiful, kind, and affectionate.

Few characters have exhibited so many excellent qualities, and fewer still have been so exempt from blemishes.

He met the embrace of death with a calmness and fortitude, which evinced at once his resignation and his hopes.

Combining in his character so many excellencies, we may justly ask, with the poet,

"Cui Pudor, et Justitiæ soror

Incorrupta Fides-nudaque Veritas

Quando ullum inveniet parem?"

The flattering promises of hope, shedding additional lustre upon his many real virtues, made him an object of the tenderest affection while living, and will endear his memory to his surviving friends.

A CURIOUS and whimsical fatality has hitherto attended the career of the poet Robert Southey. Whenever he invokes the assistance of his Muse, it sounds the tocsin for his friends and enemies to prepare for immediate battle. We know not what opinion a man would be capable of forming, if he should read all the reviews and critical strictures on this bard, pro and con, bound up in a volume by themselves. They are so directly opposed and irreconcileable, that there seems no general point of contact between them. When we leave these literary censors to fight their own battles, and turn to the page of the poet, we find nothing there recorded capable of exciting such uproar and alarm.

The real state of the case, the cause of all this difficulty, lies, we fear, deeper than the poetry of Robert Southey. He was known to have been an early advocate of the French revolution; and to have opposed the measures of the English ministry in consequence of that event, and the ministerial critics were deter

mined not to admit him to the freedom of Parnassus. They were resolved to monopolize all the genius of the kingdom, and assumed it as a postulate, that no man whose political opinions differed from theirs, was competent to write a page of common sense. Their politico-poetico adversaries, all good men and true, warred with the same weapons, and stood ready at their allotted posts, to off-set every outrageous invective by a panegyric equally outrageous. Southey was made the stalking horse, and thus his politics contributed at one and the same instant of time, to the condemnation and to the approbation of his Muse. When we are resolved to burn down a building, we seldom inquire very minutely into the order of its architecture, and the sole question then is, whether it is composed of inflammable materials? Such are the unhappy consequences of blending things in their nature so different as politics and poetry.

From the zeal with which this controversy has been carried on, we should fear it might terminate in a battle literally epic. Amidst all this jangle and contrariety of opinion, an incident transpires, that throws both the friends and the enemies of Southey into attitudes the most awkward and embarrassing, and that is his political conversion. Southey has now openly renounced his former errors, and avows his proselytism to an entire different system of politics. He does think that the subjugated continent of Europe, her smoking cities and villages, the plunder of the French armies, and the indiscriminate butchery of the inhabitants, afford at least presumptive evidence that Buonaparte is a dangerous nian, that to contribute, by any means whatever, to a still further accession of his power, is to prepare the way for outrages of a similar nature. This point of deep and erudite philosophy, that what a man has done once, what he does now, he will, if circumstances permit, still continue to do in future, is made plain to the intellectual optics of Robert Southey, and we wish him joy on his conversion.

But the question occurs, what is now to be done by his critics? His former censurers surely will not continue their invectives, for this effectually prevents new proselytes to their creed, and it lessens the influence they might otherwise derive from whatever weight of character belongs to their present convert. Neither,