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“... Southey was never a ‘marvellous boy’, but he lived a boyish life in books for half a century, and Mark Storey’s Life promises to solve a puzzle about his reputation: how someone so earnest and full of ideals could draw the loyalty of one generation, the livid contempt of another, and the nostalgic indulgence of a third, without any noticeable change of character ...”

“... Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they ...”

“... with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in the media, had already rumbled the Wordsworths. ‘Wordsworth and his sister,’ he was later to observe ‘who pride themselves on having no selfishness, are of ...”

“... by Thomas Rowlandson at his liveliest, ranging from the satirical to the rustic. The text is by Robert Southey, condensed from his 1807 report on England purporting to be by a Spanish nobleman, and the joke consists of finding Southey phrases to fit Rowlandson pictures, or vice versa. One objection to this forced ...”

“... Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue ...”

“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”

“... and interior design erupted across the country. ‘Everything must now be Egyptian,’ Robert Southey grumbled. ‘The ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung around with mummies, and with the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed.’ But ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already ...”

“... layer of non-historical added value: this time a proto-Byronic plot of sex and violence, or as Robert Southey put it, ‘rust and tinsel’. As the author of two long metrical romances and editor-translator of another, Southey was the contemporary poet most sympathetic to Scott. But he agreed with Wordsworth and ...”

“... In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection ...”

“... race.’ ‘This calm declaration of a dying man was so well calculated to do mischief,’ wrote Robert Southey, who was among the crowd that morning. It convinced Southey that ‘revolution must inevitably come, and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with ...”

“... and concerns of the near-nonsensical Cave of Spleen episode in The Rape of the Lock. The fact that Robert Southey wrote enthusiastically about Taylor in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) doesn’t do much to establish the Water-Poet as an unacknowledged influence either; although he does briefly quote from Sir Gregory Nonsence, ...”

“... Was there nobody more interesting? More talented? It’s as though Coleridge had stuck with Robert Southey and never met Wordsworth. Why should a writer such as Flaubert, always so fiercely self-assured in his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was ...”