Southey, ROBERT, poet-laureate, was born at Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father, Robert Southey (1745-92), was an unlucky linen-draper; his mother, Margaret Hill (1752-1802), who likewise came of good old yeoman ancestry, was a bright, sweet-tempered woman, who could whistle like a blackbird. Much of his lonely childhood was passed with her half-sister, Miss Tyler (1739-1821), a rich, genteel old maid who hated noise and matrimony, and had a passion for cleanliness and the drama. With her he saw many plays; read Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, Hoole's Tasso and Ariosto, the Faerie Queene, Pope's Homer, and Sidney's Arcadia; and himself scribbled thousands of verses. He had meanwhile had four schoolmasters, and in 1788 was placed by an uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, at Westminster. There Picart's Religious Ceremonies led him 'to conceive a design of rendering every mythology the basis of a narrative poem;' there he formed lifelong friendships with C. W. W. Wynn and Grosvenor Bedford; and thence in 1792 he was expelled for writing an article against flogging in a school magazine. Next year, however, he entered Balliol College with a view to his taking orders. He went up to Oxford a republican, his head full of Rousseau and 'Werther,' his religious principles shaken by Gibbon; and he left it in 1794 a Unitarian, having learnt a little swimming and a little boating, and ingrained his very heart with Epicretus. And at Oxford he had a visit from Coleridge, who infected him with his dream of a 'Pantisocracy' on the banks of the Susquehanna. The Pantisocrats required wives; and wives were forthcoming in three Miss Frickers of Bristol. The eldest, Sara, fell to Coleridge; the second, Edith, to Southey; and Mary, the third, to a Robert Lovel, who with Southey in 1794 published a booklet of poems, and died two years afterwards penniless. The Pantisocrats furthermore required money, and money was not forthcoming; so, having tried medicine, and been sickened by the dissecting-room, having been turned out of doors by his indignant aunt, having lectured with some success, and having on 14th November 1795 secretly married his Edith, Southey started the same day on a six months' visit to Lisbon, where his uncle was chaplain to the British factory, and where he laid the foundation of his profound knowledge of the literatures and history of the Peninsula. He returned to England to take up law, but reading Coke to him was 'threshing straw;' so after sundry migrations—Westbury near Bristol, Burton near Christchurch, Lisbon again for a twelvemonth (1800-1), and Ireland (a brief secretaryship to its Chancellor of the Exchequer), with intervals of London—in September 1803 he settled at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake Country. The Cole- ridges were there already, and thither came Mrs Lovel: three households were to rest on Southey's shoulders.
His school friend Wynn allowed him £160 a year from 1796 till 1807, when a government pension of a like amount was granted him (he was turning meanwhile a Tory), and on this he devoted himself to a life of strenuous, incessant authorship. Joan of Arc had already appeared in 1795, and Thalaba in 1801; there followed Madoc (1805), The Curse of Kehama (1810), Roderick (1814), History of Brazil (1810-19), Lives of Nelson (1813), Wesley (1820), and Bunyan (1830), A Vision of Judgment (1821), Book of the Church (1824), History of the Peninsular War (1823-32), Colloquies on Society (1829), Naval History (1833-40), and The Doctor (1834-47), in which comes the nursery classic of 'The Three Bears.' His works number nearly fifty, and fill more than a hundred volumes; and to them must be added his contributions to the periodicals—to the Quarterly alone ninety-three articles (1808-38). These paid him handsomely, so that he died worth £12,000; but the History of Brazil brought him in eight years only the price of one article, and Madoc in a twelvemonth only £3, 17s. 1d.—Madoc, which Scott read and thrice re-read, and which Southey himself with naïve vanity admitted to be 'the best English poem since Paradise Lost.' His life was a busy and happy one: at forty-six he could say, 'I have lived in the sunshine, and am still looking forward with hope.' It flowed quietly on, the chief events in it his visit to Scott and Scotland (1805), his first meeting with Landon (1808), the visits from Shelley and Ticknor (1811, 1819), his appointment to the laureateship (1813), the death of his first boy Herbert (1806-16), the surreptitious publication of his revolutionary drama Wat Tyler (1817; written 1794), little tours in Belgium (1815), Switzerland (1817), Holland (1825, 1826), and France (1838), an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford (1820), his return as M.P. for Downton (unsolicited and declined, 1826), and Peel's offer of a baronetcy, with the welcome addition of £300 a year to his pension (1835). It came at a time of sorrow, for his wife, who had 'for forty years been the life of his life,' had six months before been placed in an asylum, and though she was brought back to Keswick, she was brought back only to die (1837). Southey never held up after that, though in 1839 he married the poetess Caroline Anne Bowles (1787-1854), for twenty years his friend and correspondent, and returned with her to Greta Hall, intending resolutely to set about two great works which he had long had in contemplation—a History of Portugal and a History of the Monastic Orders. It was not to be, for Wordsworth in 1840 found him vacuous, listless in his noble library, the 14,000 books he had collected, 'patting them with both hands affectionately like a child.' The end came on 21st March 1843; he is buried in Crosthwaite churchyard.
Macaulay in 1830 expressed a doubt whether 'fifty years hence Mr Southey's poems will be read; the doubt has been amply justified. No poet probably so well known by name is so little known by his poetry. There are some short exceptions of course—the 'Holly Tree,' 'Battle of Blenheim,' 'Stanzas written in my Library,' half-a-dozen more. But the 'Simorg,' the 'Glendoveers,' 'Mohareb'—how many can localise these creations of Southey's muse? His epics repel, not so much by prolixity or by their irregular, sometimes rhymeless metres, as by the unreality of their fact and fancy. They remind us of scene-paintings; and a scene-painting even by Roberts will fetch just nothing in the auction-room. With Southey's prose it is otherwise. He wrote out of the fullness of knowledge, for something more than the mere sake of writing; and his was that rarest gift of good pure English. Yet even here he wrote far too much, and he was often unhappy in his choice of subjects. One book alone by him, the Life of Nelson, belongs to universal literature. But though there have been better poets than Southey, no poet has been a better man than he.
His Life and Correspondence (6 vols. 1849-50), by his younger son, the Rev. Cuthbert Southey (1819-89), contains a delightful fragment of autobiography, written in 1820-25, but coming down only to 1789. It also gives hundreds of his letters to Cottle (q.v.), Landon, Lamb, William Taylor, Rickman, Ebenezer Elliott, Kirke White, Bernard Barton, Charlotte Brontë, Crabb Robinson, Sir Henry Taylor, &c. A Selection from these was edited by his son-in-law, the Rev. J. W. Warter (4 vols. 1856), who also issued Southey's Commonplace Book (4 vols. 1849-51); his Correspondence with Caroline Bowles has been edited by Professor Dowden (Dublin, 1881). See, too, the latter's Southey ('English Men of Letters' series, 1880); Dennis' Southey: Story of his Life (Boston, 1887); Sir Henry Taylor's essay in Ward's English Poets (vol. iv., 2d. ed., 1883); the brief memoir by Sidney R. Thompson in the 'Canterbury Poets' series (1888); and Smiles's work on John Murray (1891).