SOURCE: “Days Among the Dead: Prose Writings,” in Robert Southey, Twayne, 1977, pp. 158-80.

[In the following essay, Bernhardt-Kabisch discusses Southey's prose writings, contending that these works are superior to Southey's poetry.]

By common opinion, Southey's prose is greatly superior to his poetry. Contemporaries deemed it exemplary, and more recent critics have tended to agree. In fact, Southey did much to free English prose from the labored solemnity of the school of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke and to develop a medium suited to scholarly exposition, practical controversy, and unadorned narrative—a style, as he put it, pregnant with meaning yet “plain as a Doric building” ([The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, hereafter] Life, II, 133). Plainness, however, is not always a virtue; and, if Southey's prose is, as Coleridge said, a model of transparency and down-to-earth functionalism, it is also quite unpoetic and justifies Byron's quip about the Laureate's “blank verse and blanker prose”: it is unfailingly discursive and denotative, often abstract and Latinate in diction, rhythmical but not melodious, almost void of metaphor, and frequently poor in active verbs and constructions. Always richly informative, it seldom reaches beyond the merely practical or commonplace in thought and feeling, seldom transforms knowledge into power. It thus cannot, despite its vast bulk, be said to occupy a prominent place in English letters. A brief look at representative works in each of three main categories—history and biography, essay and journal, anecdotal miscellany—will, and must, suffice to round out our picture of Southey the man and the poet.

I HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY: THE LIFE OF NELSON

Southey's historical writings do not repay extensive perusal today. Immensely well read, Southey had a stupendous array of facts at his command; but he lacked the political acumen and the interpretive skill necessary to make history much more than a glossed chronicle of events. His most ambitious project, the great “History of Portugal,” was, indeed, to have been a work both encyclopedic and epic that would combine diversity of events and “manners” with unity of idea and design. But it was never completed, and the very vastness of Southey's plan suggests a fatal inability to select: the main opus was to be supplemented by additional volumes on the Portuguese empires in Asia and South America, on monasticism, on the Jesuits and Jesuit missions, and on Spanish and Portuguese literature. The only episode of the “History” ever to appear in print, The Expedition of Orsua and the Crimes of Aguirre (1821), is an extended article—it appeared originally in the Edinburgh Annual Register—that exhibits swift, economical narration. But, even at its best, Southey's historical writing is apt to tire the reader by a breathless hurry from detail to detail that leaves little room for any attempt to put things in perspective. Southey's main strength is his ability to crowd a great deal of information readably into a small space, to distill, in his own recurrent metaphor, “wine into alcohol.” It is thus regrettable that his plan for a literary encyclopedia never came to fruition.¹

Indiscriminate inclusiveness marks notably the three-volume colonial History of Brazil, the only completed portion of the great Portuguese scheme. Begun during the British South America venture of 1807, the work was soon disparaged by Southey himself, but was nonetheless doggedly continued and finished at last in 1819. The first Brazilian history ever written, it is at least a remarkable feat of research that is still authoritative today—it has recently been translated for the second time into Portuguese. By contrast, the History of the Peninsular War (1823-32) is vitiated by Southey's incompetence in military affairs and was handicapped from the outset by Wellington's refusal to make his papers available to Southey. It was thus speedily eclipsed by the authorized history published concurrently by Colonel Napier, who had the Duke's blessing and who had himself participated in the campaigns. However, Southey's work offers compact and graphic narrative, such as the moving account of the siege of Saragossa. Compactness is also the main virtue of the Book of the Church (1824), a popular and polemical religious history of England from the Druids to 1689.

Finer and more lasting fruits of Southey's historical researches are found in his biographies. Here, again, Southey tends to distill wine into alcohol, and his subjects rarely come fully alive. But the focus on the biography of a single man makes for a unity and a perspective not found in the histories. The Life of Wesley (1820) is a skillful epitome of the entire Methodist movement. The Lives of the British Admirals (1833-7), remarkable for its pioneering (if prolix) use of Spanish sources, has been called the finest portrait gallery of Elizabethan naval heroes in the language. Above all, the Life of Nelson (1813) owes its continued popularity to its shapeliness and perspicuity. Essentially an elaboration of Southey's review in the Quarterly of the official Nelson biography published in 1806 by James Stanier Clarke and John M'Arthur, the Life bears all the traits of the review articles of the time—synopsis, glossed paraphrase, frequent quotation—and has not inaccurately been described as largely a “skillful literary abridgment” of the earlier work.² There are instances of confused narrative and of stylistic unevenness that are due to a make-shift use of passages lifted from the source—Southey was pressed for time. Moreover, the facts are not always accurate by present standards of Nelson scholarship. But the whole is a triumph of tidy epitomizing and a remarkably competent work to come from a landlubber.

Southey's portrait of England's greatest naval hero is frank and engaging. Southey does not have Carlyle's myth-making power, as the feebleness of the attempt at apotheosis in the last sentence of the Life makes plain. But neither does he indulge in headlong hero-worship. While doing full justice to Nelson's naval genius, he blames him severely, even unfairly, for the ruthless liquidation of the Neapolitan revolutionaries and of their leader Carraciolo; he repeatedly disparages Nelson's devotion to the degenerate Neapolitan court; and, of course, he frowns upon Nelson's “infatuated attachment,” as he primly terms it, to Lady Hamilton to whose influence he, in fact, ascribes all of Nelson's Neapolitan sins.

The limits of Southey's sympathy and candor appear in his treatment of the celebrated Emma. While, on the one hand, he palliates Nelson's uncritical support of Naples' cowardly and remorseless politics by simply blaming it on the “spell” which Lady Hamilton, the close friend and confidante of the queen, had cast over him, he does not, on the other hand, furnish any real insight into this “attachment” and Nelson's consequent separation from Lady Nelson—a subject naturally shocking to Southey's prim and fervent domesticity; nor does he render intelligible the continued close friendship between Nelson and Sir William Hamilton. Although many of the documents relating to the more Byronic aspects of Nelson's life were then unavailable, and although it was scarcely appropriate to dwell at length upon those aspects, we cannot help feeling that Southey's official reticence at times radiates the coldness of incomprehension and evasiveness.

For the most part, however, Southey found Nelson a man after his own heart. Nelson's boyishness, his love of children, the mixture of kindness and pugnacity in his actions and utterances were in fact traits of Southey's own personality, as was the self-righteousness verging on petulance that occasionally marked Nelson's dispatches. Southey himself was less vainglorious and did not have the soldier's obsession with honor, but he found personified in Nelson his own fanatical devotion to duty and what went with it: integrity, independence of mind, and a hearty jingoism.

“Duty is the great business of a sea officer,” Nelson wrote to his bride; “all private considerations must give way to it, however painful” (37); “England expects every man to do his duty,” was his famous last signal to his fleet before the battle of Trafalgar; and his last words—after he had bequeathed Lady Hamilton to his country—were a repeated “Thank God, I have done my duty” (284, 292f.). At the same time, he clearly did not interpret the term in a narrow regimental sense. Nelson's career, as Southey gleefully points out, was dotted with instances of his disregarding specific orders—usually with spectacular results, as in the battles of Cape St. Vincent and Copenhagen. But if he sometimes disobeyed for glory, “the last infirmity of this noble mind” (286), as he did notably at the unsuccessful storming of Santa Cruz when he lost two hundred and fifty men and his own right arm, he usually acted on what he considered higher imperatives than those issued by the admiralty—including, significantly, an almost idolatrous devotion to kings and an unqualified hatred and contempt of “the damned French villains” and everything French (183).

Above all, however, Southey admired Nelson's humane and kindly nature:

Never was any commander more beloved. He governed men by their reason and their affections; they knew that he was incapable of caprice or tyranny; and they obeyed him with alacrity and joy, because he possessed their confidence as well as their love. ‘Our Nel,’ they used to say, ‘is as brave as a lion, and as gentle as a lamb.’ Severe discipline he detested, though he had been bred in a severe school: he never inficted corporal punishment, if it were possible to avoid it, and when compelled to enforce it, he, who was familiar with wounds and death, suffered like a woman. … But in Nelson there was more than the easiness and humanity of a happy nature; he did not merely abstain from injury; his was an active and watchful benevolence, ever desirous not only to render justice, but to do good.

(250f.)

This is eloquent praise; and, though the diction is typically abstract and colorless, with just a saving touch of synecdoche and simile, the passage sways us by the skill with which Southey amplifies and balances his statement.³

II JOURNALISM: LETTERS FROM ENGLAND

The same qualitative difference that distinguishes Southey's biographies from his other historical writings also elevates a piece of journalism like the Letters from England above his formal essays and reviews. Reviewing, then a lucrative business, supplied a large part of Southey's livelihood; but, while his pieces have some historical weight in that they helped to bring about a more dispassionate, objective, and essentially synoptic and digestive type of reviewing, they are without critical significance and, for the most part, deal with ephemera.⁴ His essays, often themselves based on reviews, are similarly limited in their merely topical concerns; and while they are sincere and vigorous, they are formless harangues, void of the sense of proportion and the ironic perspective that can turn even polemic into a thing of beauty. It is precisely a sense of form and esthetic detachment that makes the Letters from England, and even the Colloquies, still readable.

Southey had tried his hand successfully at the then-popular genre of epistolary journalism as early as 1797 when he published his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, a medley of anecdote, description, social comment, translations, original verse, historical information, and curious learning, that sold well and went through three editions. In the Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvares Espriella (1807) he improved upon the type by combining travelogue, satire, and familiar essay in the manner of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. Planned as early as 1803 as an “omnium gatherum of the odd things I have seen in England” and written at intervals between then and 1807, the book was designed to set forth in an amusing way “all I know and much of what I think respecting this country and these times,” and was published pseudonymously to promote sales and to throw off hostile reviewers.⁵

Though largely anecdotal and episodic, the Letters nonetheless exhibit a real cross section of life and “manners” in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Critical commentaries on political, economic, social, and religious affairs alternate with observations about modes of travel and transportation; countrysides and townscapes; cathedrals and antiquities; customs, styles, and fashions; foods and fads; sports and pastimes; all seasoned with local anecdotes and curiosities illustrative of human oddness in general and British spleen in particular. But what raises the work above the level of mere rhetoric and journalism is the use of a persona to veil the nakedness of Southey's biases. The choice of a young Spaniard as the pseudonymous author enabled Southey not only to hoodwink the critics but to counterpoint his critique of British abuses with a satiric portrait of Catholic and hidalgo mentality as he knew it and to create the amusing spectacle of a Papist ridiculing the English “heretics” for their superstitious enthusiasm!

Apart from such byplay, Southey's descriptions are often pedestrian. Don Manuel's journey through England naturally includes a survey of the Lake District. But that celebrated subject required far more of an imaginative synthesis than Southey's encyclopedic and miscellaneous approach could achieve. Scenes are described in picturesque detail and are said to be “lovely,” “beautiful,” “exquisite,” and “grand”; but the account remains largely topographical, the scenic features are itemized rather than seen in perspective; and, while Don Manuel calls the experience unforgettable, he is confessedly unable to make it so for us.

In like manner, Southey vents his pity for the plight of the laboring poor in Birmingham and Manchester, but he does not evoke that plight in terms sufficiently compelling to elicit pity in the reader. Unlike Swift, whose artistry is directly proportionate to his sense of moral urgency, Southey all but drops his fictional character when his feelings are aroused. The result is a sentimental preachiness that is neither esthetically attractive nor rhetorically effective. What is most graphic and particular is rather the gay trivia scattered throughout, from Don Manuel's early description of the bustle in an English inn to the vivid sketches of Bath and Bristol, Southey's two hometowns, which conclude the book. The accounts of London, the “modern Tyre” (71), are particularly entertaining and informative. With its lamps and busy streets, its traffic and street cries, its theaters and shop-windows, London bursts upon the grave Spaniard as it must have burst upon the young Southey half a generation earlier.

Politically, the Letters represent a transition in Southey's thinking. The year of Don Manuel's visit is that of the Peace of Amiens (1802), and Southey uses the occasion not only to record the illuminations and public rejoicings it called forth but to praise the peace ministry and to denounce William Pitt's politics of “war-mongering,” crushing taxation, and anti-Jacobin hysteria. Francis Burdett's agitation for Parliamentary reform is not yet the villainy it became in the Quarterly essays. We hear of the evil of “retaining institutions after their utility has ceased” (372). And, after criticizing the rotten boroughs and the fraud, bribery, and intimidation rife at the hustings, Southey goes so far as to advocate the secret ballot, a measure that was then regarded as radical and visionary (286). Throughout, he pleads for more humane and civilized standards in public life. He deplores the barbarity of British martial law and calls for military and naval reforms, including abolition of impressment, limited service, and retirement pensions. He censures Pitt's use of government informers and revenue spies as corrupting public morals. He inveighs against cruel and lurid forms of punishment and against such things as boxing, bull and bear baiting, and barbarous slaughter methods, emphasizing especially their brutalizing effect on the populace.

At the same time, Southey is already at variance with much of what then passed for liberal philosophy. His plea for a reduction of the number of capital offenses, for example, is not so much a plea for greater leniency as it is an attack upon the penological pragmatism which insists that prevention rather than retribution is the end of punishment. “Vengeance,” Southey maintains quite unfashionably, “is the foundation of all penal law, divine and human,” and punishments must, therefore, be exactly proportionate to the offenses and to the “degree of moral guilt which they indicate in the offender” (124). The issue is not punitiveness as such, but rather the materialism implicit in laws that, for example, make forgery a capital offense. “More merciless than Draco,” Don Manuel observes, “or than those inquisitors who are never mentioned in this country without an abhorrent expression of real or affected humanity, the commercial legislators of England are satisfied with nothing but the life of the offender who sins against the Bank, which is their Holy of Holies” (123). In fact, one of the most prominent features of the Letters is their hostility to the commercialism of the English—their addiction to “getting and spending.”

Commercialism, to Don Manuel, is the source of every social and economic evil; it is a poison that corrupts everything, “literature, arts, religion, government … a lues which has got into the system of the country, and is rotting flesh and bone” (368). It produces slavery in the colonies and child labor at home, pauperism in the country and untold misery in the new industrial towns. Southey particularly denounces the “manufacturing system,” the most sinister progeny of the “commercial spirit”:

I thought [Don Manuel writes from Manchester] of the cities in Arabian romance, where all the inhabitants were enchanted; here Commerce is the queen witch. … A happy country indeed it is for the higher orders; no where have the rich so many enjoyments, no where have the ambitious so fair a field, no where have the ingenious such encouragement, no where have the intellectual such advantages; but to talk of English happiness is like talking of Spartan freedom, the Helots are overlooked. In no other country can such riches be acquired by commerce, but it is the one who grows rich by the labor of the hundred. The hundred, human beings like himself, as wonderfully fashioned by Nature, gifted with like capacities, and equally made for immortality, are sacrificed body and soul. They are deprived in childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment; of the sports in which childhood instinctively indulges, of fresh air by day and of natural sleep by night. Their health physical and moral is alike destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort, and without hope, without morals, without religion, and without shame, and bring forth slaves like themselves to tread in the same path of misery.

(209f.)

Like Blake, and later Dickens, Southey is particularly indignant about the callous disregard shown to the children of the poor, who are sold into the wage slavery of the factories, where, in Don Manuel's memorable phrase, they keep “the devil's laus perennis,” or are forced to grow up in work houses where “there is none to love them, and consequently none whom they can love” (211). Southey was sufficiently old-fashioned to ascribe much of the profligacy of the poor—drunkenness among men and dissoluteness among women—to a mere lack of religious and moral instruction; but he had, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, an intuitive grasp of the vital importance of love and joy in the formation of character; and he passionately denounced a system that seemed calculated to stunt human growth.

Southey's nascent conservatism is apparent also in his fear that the new industrialism would impair the social order by eroding the middle ranks and by replacing the old graduated hierarchy with a two-caste system—in fact, Disraeli's “two nations”—of rich and poor, capitalist and proletariat, that could only end in revolution. The “manufacturing populace,” destitute and lacking the “local attachments” of the peasantry, had nothing to lose but its chains. “Governments who found their prosperity upon manufactures,” Don Manuel pithily writes, “sleep upon gunpowder” (375).

Southey's analysis of economic conditions in England is not rigorous or comprehensive. In his hands, industry is made the scapegoat for numerous and complex social and economic dislocations; and while his suggested remedies are generally sound—government regulation of industry and commerce, higher wages, reduction of the tax burden, stricter economy in government expenditures—they are often merely romantic, such as the proposal to turn back the clock and to reconvert “the poor into peasantry” and the towns into villages (379). Yet the Letters are remarkable for their articulate sensitivity to conditions wrought by the industrial revolution and for their early appeal to the social conscience in the face of radical change.

Finally, the Letters are also noteworthy for their “view of the different religious sects in the country”—an undertaking, Southey thought, equalled by “no former historian of heresies” (Letters, I, 407). The Catholic zeal of Don Manuel, if at times trying, is often put to good use, whether Don Manuel rejoices at the signs of Catholic resurgence in England, comments on the wordliness of the Establishment, deplores the “graceless and joyless system of manners” fostered by Calvinism, or pillories the day's pseudodoxia epidemica, from Methodism to Swedenborginanism and the lunatic fringe of a Thomas Taylor, Richard Brothers, or Joanna Southcott.

Much of Southey's commentary is superficial, and more has become obsolete; but some of it can still make us pause; and the rest remains at least a copious, readable source for the historian of manners, styles, and fashions, opinions, and institutions. Southey's satirical vein may not be gold or silver, and it disappears all too often (along with the fiction of Don Manuel) under the rubbish of tedious polemic and supernumerary detail. But, while it lasts, it yields a fine jovial tin, so to speak: something bright, flexible, and unpretentious.

III ESSAYS AND COLLOQUIES

Little of that joviality survives in Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829, 1831). By then, two intervening decades of social and political crisis and of personal losses had fostered a progressively anti-democratic, authoritarian viewpoint in Southey that left its imprint not only on the content but on the form of his writing. The growth of this outlook is most clearly traceable in the review essays which, written over a number of years, reappeared, revised and condensed, on the eve of the Reform Bill as Essays Moral and Political (1832). In them, Southey not only engages, at close quarters, the old bugbears of materialism, manufacturers, Malthus, Methodism, mobocracy, and Catholic Emancipation, but inveighs, in increasingly apocalyptic tones, against the monsters of disaffection, infidelity, and immortality by which he finds himself surrounded: the “un-English, un-Christian, inhuman spirit” growing in the populace; the “demoniacal” spirit of party among politicians; the “licentiousness” of the press; and a whole Domdaniel of disaffected literary men who, we learn, would publish any “scandal, sedition, obscenity, or blasphemy” to reduce the nation to their own depravity. The tendency towards dualism that once fed Southey's republican Tyrannenhass now recrudesces in behalf of law and order. “There are but two parties in this kingdom,” Southey wrote in 1831, “the Revolutionists and the Loyalists.” Two years later, he was even surer: “On our side we have God and the right.”⁶

As many of the evils which Southey attacks were real enough, some of the remedies he proposes are sound: a system of universal education; a national works program to relieve unemployment and to develop natural resources; savings-banks; reforms of poor-laws and game-laws; laws to regulate working hours. But others now appear quaint or dubious such as the vociferous call for England to become the “hive” of nations”—Southey's smug insistence that, Robert Malthus notwithstanding, God clearly wished the English to be fruitful and multiply so that they could replenish the earth and subdue it. Increasingly, moreover, Southey's program appears not just conservative but repressive and reactionary and content to treat symptoms. If he favors the Bell system of national education, his purpose is not to raise an intelligent electorate but, in his favorite proverb, to “train up the people in the way they should go”—to instruct them in the moral and religious principles of the Established Church, and to disarm them by telling them to fear God, to honor the king, and to know their place. The answer to popular distress is not popular representation but moral rearmament; relief, not reform; charity, not change. Government should be left to gentlemen: governors, like poets, are evidently born, not made. Vox populi has never been vox Dei: “God is in the populace as he is in the hurricane, and the volcano, and the earthquake” (I, 421). Even rotten boroughs and government sinecures are necessary props of the Establishment; and Southey thinks that it might be wise not only to curb the press but to repair the stocks.

The picture is equally portentous and conspiratorial in the Colloquies, written between 1820 and 1829. England is swamped by commercial and philosophical materialism, scorched by religious and political fanaticism, poisoned by obscenity; and her only salvation from the blight of industry, the plague of revolution, and the “unholy alliance” of “Popery, Dissent, and Unbelief” (II, 43f.) lies in a frankly authoritarian and paternalistic government based on Anglican doctrine, social hierarchy, and a hereditary aristocracy, and supported by a system of national education—or, rather, indoctrination. To Southey, “Omnipresence to law, and omnipotence to order, this is indeed the fair ideal of commonwealth” (I, 105). “We shall get more Utopian,” Southey wrote elsewhere “in having less liberty and more order” (Letters, IV, 252). Subjects cannot be guided by self-interest because, like children, they do not know where their true interests lie. The only effective “cement of political society” is thus the “principle of religious obedience”; “government by Public Opinion” is the beginning of anarchy (II, 197, 203).

Politics, like ethics, must be dictated, not by a utilitarian calculus, but by the consciousness of divine justice, that is, divine retribution, individual or collective. The only sure foundation of both morality and policy is a positive eschatological religion with its assertion of an ultimate and frankly vindictive patria potestas governing the universe. Infidels are therefore “engineers of evil” (109) who destroy the very foundations of the moral and political edifice. Even Dissent is a half-way station to disloyalty; and, while Southey concedes that sectarianism has its uses since, as he shrewdly observes, it “gratifies at once the social and the selfish feeling” (82), he rejects all forms of pluralism. He even welcomes the advent of technological warfare as enabling men to “act in masses as machines” rather than with “personal feeling” (I, 209f.).

Southey's critique of economic conditions and of the “trading spirit” often anticipates Carlyle's pungent invectives against Mammonism: “profit and loss became the rule of conduct; in came calculation, and out went feeling” (I, 79). In his analysis of the evils of capitalism—competition, exploitation, speculation, overproduction, unemployment, and alienation—he was ahead of his time; and his earnest and often eloquent concern about a divided nation—“the poor against the rich, the many against the few … youth against age” (31)—not only heralds a major Victorian theme but is not without relevance today. But here, too, his sympathies are too one-sided and his solutions largely romantic ones. Justly appalled by the inhuman mechanics of supply and demand and by the consequent emergence of an industrial proletariat, a “Helotry,” poor, brutal, rootless, and disaffected, he sees in Medieval feudalism an alternative social structure in which the individual was neither a cog in a machine nor an atom in a void but a vital member of an organic body politic, whose station in a firm but subtly graduated hierarchy gave coherence to his life. While acknowledging the evils of actual feudal systems, as well as the “humanizing, civilizing, liberalizing” effects of commerce (197), Southey nevertheless insists that “a patriarchal state is better and happier than a commercial one” (II, 276). If villeins were in some respects like cattle, at least they were cared for. The way to help the laboring poor then was not to emancipate them to enable them to help themselves—that way lay anarchy and jacquerie—but to replace commercial exploitation by a benevolent despotism of god-fearing, incorruptible men like Robert Southey. Still dreaming of Utopia, Southey has come to the conclusion that Pantisocracy requires a Pantocrator.

What keeps the Colloquies alive—apart from Macaulay's famous review—is not only a fine prose style but its form for which Southey felt indebted to Boethius. By bringing more than one point of view to bear and by interspersing his social commentary with precise if not evocative descriptions of the Lake scenery and some vivid historical narrative, Southey relieves an otherwise formidable succession of homilies.

The idea of a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More is potentially a happy one. As a Catholic, Renaissance man, and arch-Utopian, More can not only function as a more enlightened Espriella but can provide instructive historical parallels—“it is your lot,” he observes to his host, “as it was mine to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world”—and give perspective to Southey's own intellectual career: “Et in Utopia Ego” (I, 18). A sort of father-image (Southey identifies him with his uncle and “more than father” Herbert Hill and repeatedly alludes to Hamlet's encounter with the ghost), More is not only a figure of authority but at times a dark alter-ego whose stringent conservatism enables Southey to reserve for himself some of the optimism of his youth. Thus, while More prophesies “sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion … false doctrine, heresy and schism,” a second Wat Tyler (!), an English Jacquerie, and a worldwide Armageddon between the Holy Alliance and godless Democracy, Southey can, in his own character of “Montesinos,” resurrect some of his early millennial dreams, defend Robert Owen's Socialism against More's objections to Owen's free-thinking, and affirm Immanuel Kant's faith in man's dialectical progress towards rationality and “a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice” (!) and “perpetual peace.” “Rest there in full faith,” More replies equivocally, “I leave you to your dream” (II, 410, 426).

Unfortunately, Southey's dialogue is too often a mere expository convenience, an excuse for discontinuity and expansiveness; and the discussion, while ranging and informed, is also diffuse, verbose, repetitive, and too biased to meet the highest standards of either fact or fiction. Always prone to reduce conflict of interest to a moral dualism, Southey does not create imaginary conversations with real dramatic substance and tension, but uses More as a mere mouthpiece, or magister colloquii, with whom he bandies lectures and swaps facts and quotations: the conversation, as Lamb remarked, might as well have passed between A and B. Mildly amusing at first, when Southey mistakes his visitor for an American by his quaint speech, the situation soon grows tedious; and Sir Thomas's behavior of vanishing and reappearing like the Cheshire Cat suits ill with the gravity, and length, of his discourse. At once too solid and too merely fictitious, Southey's More compels no suspension of disbelief, any more than Southey's calling himself “Montesinos,” presumably with reference to Don Quixote's famous dream, signalizes any real self-parody. Ironically, Southey is at his best in his digressions when he evokes the view from Walla Crag; when he tells the legend of St. Kentigern, the patron of Crosthwaite Church at Keswick; or when he wistfully guides his ghostly visitor through his beloved library: “Ancient and Modern, Jew and Gentile, Mohammedan and Crusader, French and English, Spaniards and Portugueze, Dutch and Brazilians, fighting their old battles, silently now, upon the same shelf. … Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of so many generations, laid up in my garners; and when I go to the window there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky” (II, 342f.).

IV THE DOCTOR

From this library, rather than from the world beyond the window, Southey produced all his writings: his favorite occupation, he once said, was “to read and to compile” (Memoir, I, 429), to chronicle, epitomize, and moralize. No work is therefore more typical than the strange farrago of over six hundred closely printed, double-columned pages called The Doctor which Southey published—again anonymously—as his swansong towards the end of his life after he had worked on it at intervals for over two decades and to which he was still adding when his mind at last gave way. Ostensibly it tells the story of “Dr. Daniel Dove of Doncaster and his horse Nobs”—a yarn Coleridge used to spin, whose “humor lay in making it as long-winded as possible” and in never telling it the same way twice. In fact, however, the book, whose full title is The Doctor, etc., comprises a Gargantuan mass of anecdotes, ruminations, homilies, curious learning, topography, genre sketches, extravagant fancies, chit-chat, plain nonsense, and innumerable synopses and excerpts from Southey's often recondite reading, all afloat on a mere trickle of narrative that often disappears for whole chapters and flows nowhere in particular. As Southey explained to Caroline Bowles, he intended “little more at first than to play the fool in a way that might amuse the wise” but soon “perceived that there was no way in which I could so conveniently dispose of some of my multifarious collections, nor so well send into the world some wholesome but unpalatable truths, nor advance speculations upon dark subjects, without giving offense or exciting animadversion. With something therefore of Tristram Shandy in its character, something of Rabelais, more of Montaigne, and a little of old Burton, the predominant character is still my own.”⁷

In large portions, the work is in fact a glorified commonplace book. Southey liked to compare his researches to digging for pearls or precious stones in a dungheap; and one purpose of The Doctor was to mount these treasures and to offer them as a kind of literary rummage sale for the delight and instruction of posterity. As “quotationipotent mottocrat,”⁸ he lords it over his readers in eight different languages. Virtually no chapter is without lengthy excerpts, some chapters are mere centos of quotations, each chapter has its motto, each volume an entire “prelude” of mottos. Many of these have little or nothing to do with the story, in spite of Southey's solemn protestations to the contrary; but, as in the Omniana or in the documentary undergirding of the epics, they exist for their own sake or serve as trappings for Southey's hobby-horses.

In particular, The Doctor also exhibits some of that packrat fascination for curious trivia, exploded opinions, weird superstitions, and morbid obsessions that makes parts of Southey's notebooks such bizarre reading. Ranging from reports about “that painter of great but insane genius” William Blake (clxxxi), through tales of gruesome or unscrupulous medical practices, to anecdotes about vampires, lycanthropes, and horned or oviparous women (cxxviii) and the belief that Eve was made from Adam's tail (ccviii), the book at times resembles Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, from which, indeed, it frequently quotes. Southey's attitude, however, while sometimes anatomical and pathological, is usually merely critical and homiletic—when not simply morbid—combining the complacence of hindsight with an anxious yet futile endeavor to separate “reasonable” belief from “unreasonable” credulity. As elsewhere, myth and religion, old miracle-mongers and new fanatics, monks and montebanks, Methodists, Mohammedans, and unclean spirits are judged at the bar of mere commonsense and “natural piety.” There is some genuine criticism, as in the chapter on the persecution of the Jews and the superstitious calumnies that underlay them (cxx); but even in this case Southey does not see beyond “Popery” to the deeper causes of anti-Semitism. In another interesting chapter on fetishism and object-worship, Southey adopts the anthropological viewpoint of a de Brosses or Court de Gebelin, but only to discard it for a safe platitude about man's fallen condition (cxlvii). Southey's discourse on such matters is always but one part science and two parts apologetics.

Much of this gossip is in a spirit of fun. But, while the tone of The Doctor is temperate and whimsical, that does not bespeak a mellowing of Southey's opinions, but is due to the fact that he addresses himself throughout to the “Ladies,” whom he assumes to be sympathetic to his fogyish views. When occasion serves, he attacks the Reform Bill as a “mass of crudities”; parades his contempt for all Whigs; scourges Catholic Emancipation, the manufacturing system, and democracy; and fires broadsides at “the race of Political Economists, our Malthusites, Benthamites, Utilitarians or Futilitarians” (xxxv). Conversely, while he is censuring the callousness of the Peers who defeated a bill against employment of children as chimney sweeps, he carefully pulls his punches, ostensibly lest “any irritation which [strong] language might excite should lessen the salutary effects of self-condemnation”—a scruple notably absent from his attacks on liberals and commoners—and hastens to add a caveat against “revolutionary schemes” and any inclination to substitute “political hopes” for “religious faith” (xvi).

With increasing bluntness, Southey insists that “sound” and “orthodox” are synonymous terms (ccxxxvi). “Knowledge” is good only if it leads to “wisdom,” that is to say, to dutiful acquiescence is the status quo as the will of God. Duties, moreover, gain in moral value in proportion to their unpleasantness: to believe otherwise would be to sanction the nasty hedonism of the futilitarians. Needless to say, Southey merely raises eudaemonism to a higher level since he hinges his entire Weltanschauung on the concept of posthumous rewards and punishments, a concept to which even the existence of God seems at times merely a necessary presupposition. Christianity means essentially the guarantee of this metaphysical panacea; and Southey's reply to unbelief is the pragmatic one that only fools or knaves could want to demolish so priceless a comfort (ccxviiif.). Accordingly, he never tires of dwelling, sometimes casually, sometimes in full unction, upon the brevity of life; the vanity of earthly wishes; age, sorrow, and death; and their eventual redressal in a heaven of changeless order and gemuetlichkeit.

Better minds than Southey have held similar tenets. What estranges the modern reader is the defensive and commonplace character of Southey's reformulations; his refusal to engage in a real dialogue with the intellectual forces that were fast rendering such tenets obsolete; his futile attempt to turn back the clock to the time of the judicious Hooker and Robert South, favorite authors of his, and to drown out, with endless citations and iterations and name-calling, the new voices that he could not silence with more original arguments. Montaigne once said that he liked better to forge his mind than to furnish it: Southey openly prefers furnishing to forging (cxxiii). Too fragile to be broken, blown, burned, and made new, his mind grows merely by accretion—by his discovering ever new corroborations of what he already believes.

Yet therein lies also the charm of The Doctor—a charm that makes the work something more than a mere monument of an exploded theology, philosophy, and psychology that is useful only to the historian of opinions. In a ceaseless search for reassurance about the enigma of death and for a “golden mean between superstition and impiety” (clxxx), Southey ranges not only through Christian theology and devotional writing but into remotest regions, from the Institutions of Menu to the “Bardic System,” from ruminations concerning ghosts and spirits to amused yet wistful anecdotes about the searchers for the Elixir of Life and the Philosophers' Stone. Moreover, under the protective persona of his fictitious hero, Southey permits himself some unorthodox “speculations” about pre-existence, metempsychosis, karma, and evolution—complete with quotations from Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode”—which he passes off as “the Columbian Philosophy,” half in jest, half in earnest, as his own yet not his own, comforting yet not committing.⁹ The spokesman of a kind of Religio Medici, Daniel Dove is also Southey's Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh.

He does not, indeed, have the troubled Faustian nature of Carlyle's hero. Physician, goodman, and rural “flossofer,” he is rather a sort of blend of Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose and Sterne's Walter Shandy. But, like Teufelsdroeckh, he is a somewhat fantastic alter-ego—he may even owe some of his later mystifications to Carlyle's influence. The name Daniel, we are told, connotes both the prophet and the patriarch Dan, as well as the river Don of Doncaster; Dove links the Doctor with Jonah, Joan of Arc, Columbus, and the river Dove; and the letter D or Δ (blazoned in mystic triune form on the title page) initials everything that is important, from Danger, Doom, the Devil, and the Deity, to Duty, Devotion, Domesticity, Drink, Dung, and Diarrhea (sic) (xxxiii, clxxvf.). Like Wordsworth's Wanderer, moreover, the Doctor is represented as the amiable mentor of the author's youth, his “guide, philosopher, and friend,” “teacher,” and “moral physician”—an ideal elective father figure (otherwise childless) who made him what he is and whose confidant and apostolic disciple he became (clviii, cliii).

Like the Wanderer, Daniel also bears autobiographical traits. His mother's name is Margaret; her aunt, the beautiful but cold, shrewish, and overbearing Melicent Trewbody, seems to be a caricature of Elizabeth Tyler; Daniel's “half-saved,” quasi-Tobyish uncle William Dove is clearly a portrait of Southey's uncle William Tyler; and the famous “Story of the Three Bears,” which Southey introduces as one of William Dove's yarns was probably a story Southey had heard in childhood from the “Squire.”¹⁰

These autobiographical elements are in fact among the most vivid and most truly narrative ones in the book. While plunging back into the “History of Portugal,” Southey himself could sigh “how much more accurate, and perhaps a thousand years hence, more valuable, a book it would be were I to write the History of Wine Street below the Pump. … It almost startles me to see how the events of private life … equal or outdo novel and comedy [and] all that history offers” (Life, III, 32). If his letters are any indication, Southey might have done well with such personal narrative. With their steely cheerfulness; their puns and conundrums; their thousand projects and notices of, and responses to, everything from politics to poetry, and their “meipseads” and tattle about his children and his cats, the letters are among the most attractive of his prose writings. In this medium, even his fits of pharisaical self-righteousness are tolerable because they are manifestly subjective—the expressions, not of a spokesman, but of a character, who is truculent because vulnerable, and pugnacious from excessive tenderness. But Southey was too much the prisoner of his own defenses to be capable of the candor, or shamelessness, of his fellow-Romantics; and the masquerade of Espriella and the Doctor remained the only steps in this direction.

Characteristically, Daniel Dove is a figure of the past, the good old days. A coeval of Southey's grandparents, he represents an idyllic, pastoral interregnum of rural mirth and manners before materialism, manufacturing, Methodism, and Independence had reared their ugly heads: “We had our monarchy, our hierarchy, and our aristocracy,—God be praised for the benefits which have been derived from all three, and God in his mercy continue them to us!—but we had no plutarchy … no great capitalists. … Feudal tyranny had passed away, and moneyed tyranny had not yet arisen” (cii). A world of “local attachments,” common decencies, and simple verities, it had few newspapers; no “pestiferous tracts, either seditious or sectarian” (cix); and no politics—Doncaster happily “sends no members to parliament” (xxxiv). Clouds of “Wilkes and liberty” brood distantly on the horizon—Southey makes his hero a contemporary of Wilkes at the University of Leyden—but only to set off the sunshine of this better day: Daniel, we are told, never associated with the reprobate Jack, “a man whose irreligion was of the worst kind, and who delighted in licentious conversation” (lxxxv). Utopia, too—for even Daniel dreams of Utopia—is now based on absolute monarchy, hereditary nobility, and an absolute constitution; Daniel's House of Commons is returned by universal suffrage but has no legislative power (ccxli)!

Southey populates this agrarian idyl with a variety of unexceptionable eighteenth-century characters. Mr. Allison, the retired tobacconist and local magnate, is a lesser Squire Allworthy, modeled, like the latter, on Ralph Allen of Bath; his residence, Thaxted Grange, owes much to Southey's memories of his grandmother's farm at Bedminster. Mr. Bacon, the widowed father of Deborah Dove, is a pastor and teacher of Goldsmithian purity. There is the elder Dove, “Flossofer Daniel,” a fervant believer in white witchcraft who holds, with Kenelm Digby, that warts can be cured by washing the hands in moonshine—which, however, “must be caught in a bright silver basin” (vii). There is the childlike William Dove. Above all, there is Daniel, the Doctor and dreamer, Southey's embodiment of good-natured commonsense and a golden mean of innocent wisdom, prudent affection, and sensible piety. With a head well-furnished, if ill-forged; a heart affectionate, though neither spontaneous nor passionate; and a life of peaceful industry and domestic contentment, Daniel Dove is both an idealized portrait of Southey—we are told explicitly, in one of Southey's many coy self-references, that the Doctor was “like Southey” (xxxiv)—and a monument to a vanishing way of life.

It has been thought that Southey might have made a good novelist. The Doctor shows that Southey had an eye for settings and “manners” and could render an episode or dash off a portrait, at least of certain types of persons. But he lacked the psychological acumen and the moral sympathy required of a novelist and the ability to control and unify a broad array of characters and events. In several of the rather frequent bursts of unblushing self-praise that dot the book, Southey insists that the work has a unity all its own; and, in the Preface, he compares it rather preeningly to the peacock feather with which he is writing: “The combination of parts, each perfect in itself … yet all connected into one harmonious whole; the story running through like the stem or backbone, which the episodes and digressions fringe like so many featherlets, leading up to that catastrophe, the gem or eye-star, for which the whole was formed, and in which all terminate.” What the “catastrophe” was to have been we shall never know; but, even if we did, the work would not evince the organic unity promised in the Preface. A later comparison to a musical suite (xciv) is more apt, but the book reminds us even more of a literary periodical like The Spectator.

Often, of course, the outrageous disproportion between story and detail is meant to be funny, as when Southey uses dozens of learned allusions and hundreds of equestrian terms to describe the Doctor's trusty steed Nobs (cxliiif.). More often, however, such detail is merely prolix, as when the narrative of Daniel's residence at Leyden is buried under numerous historical anecdotes, a list of things that might be described but won't be, and lengthy ruminations concerning the difference between falling and “getting” in love (xlix-liv). Even the most nearly sustained narrative, the love story of Mrs. Dove's parents, Leonard and Margaret, is thin in plot, notwithstanding its reliance on personal history, and it rarely rises above sentimental cliché: orphaned cousins, unfeeling relatives, wedded bliss of godliness and happy poverty, the girl's early death and enshrinement in the widower's worshipful memory, and so on. John Gibson Lockhart, reviewing The Doctor in the Quarterly (no. ci), deemed this “the sweetest Love-story that has been penned for many a day in the English tongue.” Most people today will find it rather too sweet.

Some critics also have praised the humor in The Doctor. Southey's original intention had been, as he said, “to play the fool”; as early as 1805, in fact, he had dreamed of “out-Rabelaising Rabelais, out-Sternifying Sterne” (New Letters, I, 384) with a book of “sublime nonsense” such as “requires more wit, more sense, more reading, more knowledge, more learning, than go to the composition of half the wise ones of the world” (Life, II, 33). Southey can be charmingly whimsical, as in “The Three Bears,” the accounts of the cats and the garden statues of Greta Hall, or the chapter concerning the elder Daniel's “Experiment upon Moonshine,” a gem worthy of Sterne. But his attempts at “pantagruelism” are often overdone, and his “shandeizing” tends to decline into mawkishness and has little of Sterne's keen sense of the dubiousness of all things. Himself the melancholy buffoon whom he discusses in Chapter lxxi, Southey has the kind of wintry, inhibited humor that finds much mirth in fleas and flatulence but frowns on decolletages and that smirks about the conception and birth of Nobs but pretends that such things are confined to the animal kingdom. He can turn around to ridicule, in a “Chapter Extraordinaire,” the “Ultradelicates” and “Extrasuperfines” like Dr. Bowdler, whose Family Shakespeare he calls (in roundabout terms) a gelding. In general, however, The Doctor is an eminently Victorian book—one repeatedly recommended for its impeccable morality and its suitableness for reading in a “domestic circle.”

Characteristically, Southey tries to compensate for his comic impotence by an immoderate amount of self-conscious egotizing—what Lockhart, not realizing that he was excoriating his own valued essayist and reviewer, called “the heavy magniloquence of his own self-esteem.” Throughout, Southey strives for comic effect by turning the narrative upon itself; by chatting about its genesis, profound purpose, and intricate method; by parrying numerous thrusts from critics, real or imagined; by hinting that The Doctor is the greatest book ever written; and by appealing to posterity and the “Ladies” for their applause. Moreover, taking advantage of his anonymity, he coyly quotes from the writings of “Dr. Southey,” or otherwise refers to himself, rather more frequently than anyone else would (or could) have done. At their best, these “meipseads” and “tattle-de-moys” have a certain charm; but too often they merely look puerile—as does the overuse of food metaphors.

V EPILOGUE

“Scoff ye who will,” Southey exclaimed in the Proem to The Poet's Pilgrimage, “but let me, gracious Heaven, / Preserve this boyish heart till life's last day.” We have learned from Wordsworth to admire such “natural piety”; and, thus taught, Edward Dowden could speak of Southey as “one whose spirit, grave with a man's wisdom, was pure as the spirit of a little child” (199). Yet I think it would be more accurate to say that, unlike Wordsworth, Southey never fully resolved the child's twofold need for dependence and self-assertion into the “resolution and independence” of mature adulthood. He himself cherished his boyishness as an “inward light by nature given” to cheer him and to “shine forth with heavenly radiance at the end” (X, 9). We hope that it did; but few readers will find enough brilliance in “The Old Man's Comforts” (II, 171) to lighten their own darkness.

Looking back, Southey also deemed it “the greatest of all advantages that I have passed more than half of my life in retirement, conversing with books rather than men … communing with my own heart, and taking that course which … seemed best to myself” (I, 6). The statement, typical in its somewhat bridling self-sufficiency, reveals the vicarious nature of Southey's literary life and bears out Coleridge's observation that “unceasing Authorship, never interrupted … but by sleep & eating,” was Southey's way of compensating for the absence of fulfilling human relationships (Coleridge, III, 92). Southey's sketch of himself taking supper with a folio by his plate tells a similar story, as does Coleridge's reference to Southey's library as his “wife.” To that library Southey retired not only to work and to feed his many charges “all from an ink-stand,” but to seek refuge from the “aunt-hill” and, like the bears of his tale, from the intrusive world at large.

There he could relate to men from a distance by his writings and by his voluminous—and scrupulously punctual—correspondence. There, in particular, he communed with his soul-mate, the spinster and sentimental poetess Caroline Anne Bowles, who for many years provided an inspiration that Mrs. Southey, for all her wifely devotion, could not give; who sustained him especially in the difficult years of Edith's lunacy; and whom he married at last after Edith's death, shortly before his own lapse into senility.¹¹ Above all, however, Southey found joy and comfort in his “dear and noble books”—some fourteen thousand volumes—in arranging them, “worshipping” them daily, poring over them while light was left him, and patting them tenderly after his mind had at last worn itself out. His love for books, he told Caroline, never went past the honeymoon stage. Cutting the pages of a new volume was like exploring virgin land; opening a box of books, like stepping through the gate of heaven. To his books he felt beholden “for every blessing which I enjoy” (Colloquies, II, 346); without them, he must be looked after, “lest I should hang myself in a fit of despondency” (Correspondence, 117). “My days among the Dead are passed,” he wrote in his best-known lyric: it is the truest line he penned.

As a result, Southey's writings inevitably breathe the spirit of museum and ivory tower, and few of them break through the charmed circle of folios and midnight oil to speak directly of the doubtful doom of human kind. His long poems command respect as valiant endeavors to revitalize epic and romance by supplying them with new subject matter and by adapting them to new themes. But all of them are vitiated by extravagance of incident, by a corresponding lack of metaphorical depth in the language, and above all by a fatal inability to create rounded and impressive characters. They thus remained massive milestones on the road of a moribund tradition, influential only for the young Shelley.¹² Only The Curse of Kehama, and perhaps Roderick, appeal to more than academic interest. Southey's lyrical poems, while again repeatedly innovative and therefore of some historical significance, are even more severely crippled by the dearth of metaphor in his language, as well as by the absence of an ironic dimension. A few lyrics succeed by creating expressive emblems, and a few ballads can still captivate us with their quick-paced renditions of supernatural or otherwise pathetic anecdote; the rest is negligible.

Of Southey's vast prose opus, his journalism, with its combination of description, narration, and spry commentary, is most alive today, including the Life of Nelson (which is really an extended review article); the Letters from England; and parts of the Colloquies, of the Doctor, and of the private correspondence. Southey's prose style, while no richer or more dynamic than his poetic language, is exemplary for its lucidity, amplitude, and literal precision. In his larger historical works, however, Southey tends to bog down because of his unworldly and compulsive ambition to chronicle everything; his essays and polemical writings alienate us by their humorless filibustering and their lack of dialectic; and the best Southey can do in a work like The Doctor is to travesty his own bookishness and garrulity and thus to turn it into a somewhat ponderous joke. Among these impenetrable thickets, the spare grace and patterned whimsy of the immortal “Story of the Three Bears” seems almost magical.

If, despite all his eloquence, Southey very rarely speaks to us, if his words seem apt but not inevitable, informative but seldom irradiating, it is because in the final analysis he never fully faced either the world or himself. Carlyle remembered him as “sharp, almost fierce-looking … with very much of the militant in his aspect” and having in his eyes “a mixture of sorrow and anger, or of angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the world had not yet ended in victory, but also never should in defeat.”¹³ That is a telling portrait, though a very Carlylean one. Equally telling is the “Portrait of the Author” that serves as the frontispiece to The Doctor. It shows a curly-headed Southey seated at his writing-desk, with his back to the viewer, facing a windowless wall lined solidly with books. It sums up not only The Doctor but the life and work of its author.

Notes

1. The “Bibliotheca Britannica”; cf. [Jack Simmons, Southey, (London, 1945).] 100; Letters, [A Selection from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. J. W. Warter, 4 vols. (London, 1856).] I, 219.

2. See the edition by Michael Macmillan (1892), p. 281n. I quote from the (excellently introduced) edition by E. R. H. Harvey (London, 1953).

3. Other biographical writings include the lives of Bunyan and Cowper prefixed to the editions of their works and the short lives of Cromwell and Wellington published in the Quarterly (nos. 26-7, 50).

4. Between 1797 and 1804, Southey wrote mostly for Arthur Aikin's liberal Monthly Magazine and for the more conservative Critical Review, including, for the latter, the reviews of Lyrical Ballads and Gebir. Between 1802 and 1808, he reviewed, for Aikin's Annual Review, (inter alia) Malthus's Principles of Population, Godwin's Life of Chaucer, Ritson's Romances, and Bruce's Travels. After 1808, he wrote mostly for the Quarterly (see Life, VI, 400-2; and K. Curry & R. Dedmon, “Southey's Contributions to The Quarterly Review,” The Wordsworth Circle, VI [1975], 261-72).

5. Life, II, 231; Letters, I, 282; Simmons, Letters from England, [Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Espriella. Ed. Jack Simmons. London: Cresset Press, 1951.] p. xix.

6. Essays, [Robert Southey. Essays, Moral and Political. 2 vols. 1832,] I, 136; II, 84; Life, VI, 134, 222.

7. Correspondence, [The Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles ed. Edward Dowden (London, 1881).] 326f.; cf. Coleridge, [The Collected Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–72)] III, 391. The book was begun in 1813 as told in the opening chapter; vols. I & II appeared in 1834.

8. The Doctor. Interchapter xiii. I quote from J. W. Warter's one-volume edition (1848), using the numbering of chapters there given. M. H. FitzGerald's abridgment (London, 1930) omits much of the gay or extravagant trivia, thereby rendering the text more bland and solemn than it is.

9. Ibid., Chs. ccxii-ccxxxvii. Early on he jestingly envisions his book as the future Bible of a new religion of “Dovery” (interch. ii). Cf. also Colloquies, [Robert Southey, Sir Thomas Moore:or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1829, 1831] II, 399, on the speculative uses of literature.

10. The discovery, in 1951, of an MS, version of this tale by one Eleanor Mure, which antedates Southey's version of 1837 by six years, has cast doubt upon Southey's authorship of this classic. The story, however, was current in the Southey household at least as early as 1813 (cf. Letters, II, 328). At the same time, Southey no doubt did not invent it but derived it from his uncle Tyler. Cf. Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 1951.

11. Southey's friendship with Caroline Bowles dates from 1818, when she wrote him for advice about publishing her first poem, Ellen Fitzarthur. Some dozen years younger than Southey, she had recently lost her mother and had gone into a severe emotional crisis, from which “abyss,” she afterwards insisted, Southey had rescued her. They resembled each other remarkably.

12. See Warren U. Ober, “Lake Poet and Laureate: Southey's Significance to his own Generation,” Indiana University doctoral dissertation (1958), pp. 357-65.

13. Madden, [Lionel Madden, ed. Robert Southey (London, 1972).] Robert Southey, p. 461