Of public praise. O friend revered, O guide
And fellow-labourer in this ample field,

How large a portion of myself hath past

With thee, from earth to Heaven!..Thus they who reach
Grey hairs, die piecemeal. But in good old age
Thou hast departed;..not to be bewailed,..

Oh no! The promise on the Mount vouchsafed,
Nor abrogate by any later law

Reveal'd to man,.. that promise, as by thee
Full piously deserved, was faithfully

In thee fulfill'd, and in the land thy days
Were long. I would not, as I saw thee last,
For a king's ransom have detain'd thee here,..
Bent, like the antique sculptor's limbless trunk,
By chronic pain, yet with thine eye unquench'd,
The ear undimm'd, the mind retentive still,
The heart unchanged, the intellectual lamp
Burning in its corporeal sepulchre!

No; not if human wishes had had power

To have suspended Nature's constant work,

Would they who loved thee have detained thee thus, Waiting for death.

That trance is over. Thou

Art entered on thy heavenly heritage ;

And I, whose dial of mortality

Points to the eleventh hour, shall follow soon.

Meantime, with dutiful and patient hope,

I labour that our names conjoin'd may long
Survive, in honour one day to be held
Where old Lisboa from her hills o'erlooks
Expanded Tagus, with its populous shores
And pine woods, to Palmella's crested height:
Nor there alone; but in those rising realms
Where now the offsets of the Lusian tree

Push forth their vigorous shoots,.. from central plains,
Whence rivers flow divergent, to the gulph
Southward where wild Parana desembogues,
A sea-like stream; and northward in a world
Of forests, where huge Orellana clips

His thousand islands with his thousand arms.

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

PREFACE.

THIS book originated in the train of thought described in the introductory pages, and was begun at the time there specified. For the form which it has taken I am indebted to Boethius; an obligation which perhaps few readers would have suspected, but which I am not the less bound to acknowledge. Farther than this it is only necessary to say, that recent circumstances have produced no change in the author concerning the Roman Catholic Question; no one however can more sincerely wish that timid counsels may be proved by the event to have been wise ones; that government may gain strength by yielding to menaces;

and that the Protestant Constitution of these kingdoms may be secured by abandoning the principles upon which it was established.

And here this Preface would have ended, if a certain Rev. Mr. Shannon, who was three or four times in company with me, three or four and twenty years ago, had not thought proper to affirm in a recent pamphlet, that Mr. Southey expressed to him at that time, "ardent wishes" for the restoration of what he calls "the Catholic rights;" and to assert that such wishes could not possibly have been changed, except from “ causes that are liable to suspicion." It is so utterly insignificant what opinions any individual may have advanced upon such a topic, long ago, in the freedom of conversation, at a private table, that I should not think it worth while to bestow any public notice upon such a statement, still less upon the insinuation which accompanies

it, were there not persons in whom party spirit has so far destroyed the sense of honour and of justice, that any authority however futile is sufficient for them, when the purpose of detraction is to be served by it. But these ardent wishes," and the energy of language in which Mr. Shannon pretends to remember that they were expressed, never had, or could have had any existence, except in the dreams of his own imagination. For it is well known to every one of my early friends, (and few men, as they pass through life, have dropt fewer of their friendships on the way,) that my opinions respecting the Roman Catholic claims to seats in Parliament and certain offices in the state have always been the same. I have ever maintained that the Romanists ought to be admitted to every office of trust, honour, or emolument, which is not connected with legislative power; but that it is against the plainest rules of