iewer
warned the author of the _Doctor_, that there is no greater mistake
than that which a grave person falls into, when he fancies himself
humorous; adding, as a consolatory corollary to this proposition, that
unquestionably the doctor himself was in this predicament. But Southey
was not so rigorously grave a person as his graver writings might seem
to imply. 'I am quite as noisy as ever I was,' he writes to an old
Oxford chum, when in sober manhood. 'Oh, dear Lightfoot, what a
blessing it is to have a boy's heart! it is as great a blessing in
carrying one through this world, as to have a child's spirit will in
fitting us for the next.' On account of this boyish-heartedness, he is
compared by Justice Talfourd to Charles Lamb himself: 'In a certain
primness of style, bounding in the rich humour which overflowed it,
they were nearly akin; both alike reverenced childhood, and both had
preserved its best attributes unspotted from the world.' In the
fifty-fifth year of his age, he characterised himself as a man

----by nature merry,
Somewhat Tom-foolish, and comical, very;
Who has gone through the world, not unmindful of pelf,
Upon easy terms, thank Heaven, with himself,
Along bypaths, and in pleasant ways,
Caring as little for censure as praise;
Having some friends, whom he loves dearly,
And no lack of foes, whom he laughs at sincerely;
And never for great, nor for little things,
Has he fretted his guts[2] to fiddle-strings.
He might have made them by such folly
Most musical, most melancholy.

No one can dip into the _Doctor_ without being convinced of this
buoyancy of spirit, quickness of fancy, and blitheness of heart. It
even vents its exuberance in bubbles of levity and elaborate trifling,
so that all but the _very_ light-hearted are fain to say: Something
too much of this. Compared with our standard humorists--the peerage,
or Upper House, who sit sublimely aloft, like 'Jove in his chair, of
the sky my lord mayor'--Southey may be but a dull commoner, one of the
third or fourth estate. But for all that, he has a comfortable fund of
the _vis comica_, upon which he rubs along pleasantly enough,
hospitably entertaining not a few congenial spirits who can put up
with him as they find him, relish his simple and often racy fare, and
enjoy a decent quantum of jokes of his own growing, without pining
after the brilliant banquets of comedy spread by opulent barons