From the establishment of the Tory Quarterly Review Southey, whose revolutionary opinions had changed, was one of its most regular and useful writers. He supported Church and State, opposed parliamentary reform, Roman Catholic emancipation, and free trade. He did not cease, however, to advocate measures for the immediate amelioration of the condition of the poor.
With William Gifford, his editor, he was never on very good terms, and would have nothing to do with his harsh criticisms on living authors. His relations with Gifford's successors, Sir J. T. Coleridge and Lockhart, were not much better. In 1813 the laureateship became vacant on the death of Pye. The post was offered to Scott, who refused it and secured it for Southey. A government pension of some .116o had been secured for him, through Wynn, in 1807, increased to £300 in 1835. In 1817 the unauthorized publication of an early poem on Wat Tyler, full of his youthful republican enthusiasm, brought many attacks on Southey. He was also engaged in a bitter controversy with Byron, whose first attack on the "ballad-monger" Southey in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers nevertheless did not prevent them from meeting on friendly terms. Southey makes little reference to Byron in his letters, but Byron asserts (Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, iv. 271) that he was responsible for scandal spread about himself and Shelley. In this frame of mind, due as much to personal anger as to natural antipathy to Southey's principles, Byron dedicated Don Juan to the laureate, in what he himself called "good, simple, savage verse." In the introduction to his Vision of Judgment (1820 Southey inserted a homily on the "Satanic School" of poetry, unmistakably directed at Byron, who replied in the satire of the same name. The unfortunate controversy was renewed even after Byron's death, in con sequence of a passage in Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron.
Meanwhile the household at Greta Hall was growing smaller. Southey's eldest son, Herbert, died in 1816, and a favourite daughter in 1826; Sara Coleridge married in 1829; in 1834 his eldest daughter, Edith, also married ; and in the same year Mrs. Southey, whose health had long given cause for anxiety, became insane. She died in 1837, and Southey went abroad the next year with Henry Crabb Robinson and others. In 1839 he mar ried his friend Caroline Bowles. (See SOUTHEY, CAROLINE.) But his memory was failing, and his mental powers gradually left him. He died on March 21, 1843, and was buried in Crosthwaite churchyard. A monument to his memory was erected in the church, with an inscription by Wordsworth.
Works.—The amount of Southey's work in literature is enor mous. His collected verse, with its explanatory notes, fills ten volumes, his prose occupies about forty. But his greatest enter prises, his history of Portugal and his account of the monastic orders, were left uncompleted, and this, in some sense, is typical of Southey's whole achievement in the world of letters; there is aiways something unsatisfying, disappointing, about him. This
is most true of his efforts in verse. Some of Southey's subjects, "The Poet's Pilgrimage" for instance, he would have treated delightfully in prose; others, like the "Botany Bay Eclogues," "Songs to American Indians," "The Pig," "The Dancing Bear," should never have been written. Of his ballads and metrical tales many have passed into familiar use as poems for the young. Among these are "The Inchcape Rock," "Lord William," "The Battle of Blenheim," and the ballad on Bishop Hatto.
If we turn from his verse to his prose we are in a different world; there Southey is a master in his art, who works at ease with grace and skill. "Southey's prose is perfect," said Byron, truly. His interest and his curiosity are unbounded as his Com mon-Place Book will prove; his stores of learning are at his readers' service, as in The Doctor, a rambling miscellany, valued by many readers beyond his other work. For biography he had a real genius. The Life of Nelson (2 VO1S., 1813), which has be come a model of the short life, arose out of an article contrib uted to the Quarterly Review; he contributed another excellent biography to his edition of the Works of William Cowper (15 vols., 1833-1837), and his Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (2 vols., 1820) is only less famous than his Life of Nelson. But the truest Southey is in his Letters: the loyal, gallant, tender-hearted, faithful man is revealed.
A collected edition of his Poetical Works (io vols., 5837-38) was fol lowed by a one volume edition in 1847. Southey's letters were edited by his son Charles Cuthbert Southey as The Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey (6 vols., 1849-50) ; further selections were published in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey (4 vols., 1856), edited by J. W. Warter; and The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles. To which are added: Correspondence with Shelley, and Southey's Dreams 0880, was edited, with an intro duction, by Professor E. Dowden. An excellent selection from his whole correspondence, edited by Mr. John Dennis, as Robert Southey, the story of his life written in his letters (Boston, Massachusetts, 1887), was reprinted in Bohn's Standard Library (1894). See also Southey (1879) in the English Men of Letters Series, by Professor E. Dowden, who also made the selection of Poems by Robert Southey (1895) in the Golden Treasury Series. W. Haller, Early Life of Robert Southey (1774-1803) (Columbia, 1917). A full account of his relations with Byron is given in The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (vol. vi., 1901, edited R. E. Prothero), in an appendix entitled "Quarrel between Byron and Southey," pp. 377-399. Southey figures in four of the Imaginary Conversations of W. S. Landor, two of which are between Southey and Porson, and two between Southey and Landor.