SOUTHEY 



SOUTHSEA 



593 



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 conies the nursery classic of 

 'The Three Bears.' His works number nearly 

 fifty, and lill 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 ; hut the History of 

 Brazil brought him in eight years only the price of 

 one article, and Madoc in a twelvemonth only 

 3, 17s. Id. Madoc, which Scott read and thrice 

 re-read, and which Southey himself with naive 

 vanity admitted to l>e ' the best English poem since 

 Paradise Lost.' His life was a busy and happy 

 one : at forty-six he could say, ' I have livea in 

 the sunshine, and am still looking forward with 

 hope.' It flowed quietly on, the chief events in it 

 bis visit to Scott and Scotland (1805), his first 

 meeting with Landor( 1808), the visits from Shelley 

 and Ticknpr (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 liuwntiiM (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 re- 

 turned with her to Greta Hall, intending resolutely 

 to net 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 affection- 

 fit.'ly like a child. The end came on 21st March 

 I .>:< ; he is buried in Crosthwaite churchyard. 



Macaulay in 1830 expressed a doubt whether 

 ' fifty years hence Mr Southey's poems will be 

 lend; '"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 excep- 

 tions of course the ' Holly Tree,' ' Battle of Blen- 

 heim,' ' Stanzas written in my Library,' half-a-dozen 

 more. Hut the 'Simorg,' the ' Glendoveers,' 

 ' Mohareb' how many can localise these creations 

 of Sonthey's muse? His epics repel, not so much 

 by prolixity or by their irregular, sometimes 

 riiymeless metres, as by the unreality of their fact 

 and fancy. They remind lib of scene-paintings ; 

 ami a scene-painting even by Rol>erts will fetch 

 ju*t nothing in the auction-room. With Southey's 

 pi-use it is otherwise. He wrote out of the fullness 

 of knowledge, for something more than the mere 

 4M 



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 Sonthey, 

 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 ), con- 

 tains 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.), Landor, Lamb. 

 William Taylor, Rickman, Ebenezer Elliott, Kirke 

 White, Bernard Barton, Charlotte Bronte, Crabb Robin- 

 son, Sir Henry Taylor, &c. A Selection from these was 

 edited by his son-in-law, the Rev. J. W. Warier (4 vols. 

 1856), who also issued Southey's Commonplace Book (4 

 vols. 1849-51); his Correspondence irith 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 ). 



South Georgia, a group of islands, unin- 

 habited, and almost perpetually ice-bound, in 54 

 30' S. lat. and 36 38" W. long., nearly 800 miles 

 E. by S. of the Falkland Isles, of which they are 

 a dependency. Area, 1000 sq. m. Discovered in 

 1675, they were taken possession of by Captain Cook 

 in 1775; and here in 1882-83 lived the German 

 expedition for observing the transit of Venus. 



South Island, the southern of the two large 

 islands which, with the small Stewart's Island, 

 form the British colony of New Zealand (q.v.). 



South Molton, a municipal borough (1590) 

 of Devonshire, on the Mole, 10 miles ESE. of 

 Barnstaple. It has a fine Perpendicular church 

 (restored 1865), a market-house (1864), and some 

 manufactures of woollens. Pop. (1891 ) 3126. 



South Omaha, a city (founded 1885) of Doug- 

 las county, Nebraska, 4 miles from Omaha. It is 

 on several railway lines, and has exceedingly exten- 

 sive stock-yards and packing-houses, hotels, public 

 buildings, &c. Pop. ( 1890) 8062 ; ( 1900 ) 26,001. 



Southport, a watering-place of Lancashire, 

 at the mouth of the Ribble estuary, 18 miles N. 

 of Liverpool. Its growing popularity dates from 

 1830. It has a mild climate, and broad level sands. 

 The esplanade ( 3 miles long ) commands views of the 

 Welsh and Cumberland mountains, and from it 

 projects a pier of 1465 yards, along which is a 

 steam tramway. Other features of Southport, 

 with date and cost, are the Pavilion and Winter 

 Gardens (1874; 140,000), comprising a theatre, 

 concert-hall, aquaria, &c. ; opera-house (1891; 

 seating2000); the Cambridge Hall (1874; 25,000), 

 with a clock-tower 127 feet high ; the Victoria 

 Baths (1871; 45,000); the Atkinson Public 

 Library and Art Gallery (1878 ; nearly 15,000); 

 the Grecian town-hall (1853); the market-hall 

 (1881 ; 40,000); the Victoria Schools of Science 

 and Art ( 1887 ) ; the convalescent hospital ( founded 

 1806 ; present building 1854-87 ) ; the Hesketh Public 

 Park of 30 acres (1868) ; and a marine park and 

 lake ( 1887 ; 13,000) on the foreshore fronting the 

 town. Nathaniel Hawthorne, then United States 

 consul at Liverpool, describes Southport as it was 

 in 1856 in vol. iii. of his English Notebooks (1870). 

 It was made a municipal borough in 1867, the 

 boundary being extended in 1875. Pop. (1851) 

 4765; (1871) 18,085; (1881) 32,206; (1891) 41,406. 



Soilthsea, a south-eastern suburb of Ports- 

 mouth, is a fashionable watering-place of recent 

 growth, with two piers, a fine esplanade 2 miles 

 long, a canoe lake, a common, a modernised castle 

 of 1540, and other fortifications, barracks, &c. 



