Southey's Later Radicalism

Abstract

Carlyle tells us in his Reminiscences that, when Wat Tyler made its unlucky appearance in 1817, he with other radicals “cackled and triumphed” over Southey “as over a slashed and well-slain foe to us and mankind.” A few years later, however, he read Joan of Arc, Thalaba, and The Curse of Kehama with kindlier feeling, thought them “full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, yet with a clang of chivalrous valor finely audible too.” From that time on he watched for Southey's writings, especially his Quarterly articles, as for things of value; “in spite of my Radicalism, I found very much in these Toryisms which was greatly according to my heart; things rare and worthy, at once pious and true, which were always welcome to me.”