Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known
of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. The
most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view,
is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little
astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political
satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken as it
seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm
of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a
_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning
Post_ in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point
of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-
flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in
its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach
of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour.
_Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is literary in
every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist
on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the
charge of inhuman malignity.
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