The Life of Nelson - pocketboek

THE LIFE OF NELSON - 1905 -CONCERNING SOUTHEYS NELSON ON January 13, 1813, Robert Southey wrote to Sir Walter Scott- In the course of next month I hope you will receive my Life of Nelson, a subject not self-chosen and out of my way, but executed con anzore. Three years before this 1810 Southey wrote to a friend, saying, . The Quarterly pays me well-ten guineas per sheet. I have the buIky Life of Nelson in hand, and am to be paid double. This must be for sake of saying they give twenty guineas per sheet, as I should have been well satisfied with ten and have-taken exactly the same pains. He is said to have received L300 altogether for the Lije. The book was finished on February I, 1813, and, in Southeys own opinion, the materials are in themselves so full of character, so picturesque and so sublime, that it cannot fail of being a good book. Southey had already published an article on Nelson in The Quarterly Review, and John Murray requested him to expand it into a full biography. Lord Macaulay regards this book as beyond all doubt, the most perfect and the most delightful of all Southeys works. No writer, perhaps, ever lived whose talents so precisely qualified him to write the history of the great naval warrior. The character of the hero lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque. It would not be easy to find, in all literary history, an instance of a more exact hit between wind and water. The most remarkable tribute to this Life of Nelson was paid by the United States Government, which printed an edition on fine paper for every officer, and on coarse paper for every man in its fleet. Grosvenor C. Bedford, writing to Southey telling him this fact, said- This is whatshould have been done here long ago, and would have been done, if our noblemen had been anything better than politicians, or considered the people of the country as anything but mere machines, unendowed with feelings or motives of action. It ought to be in the chest of every seaman, from the admiral to the cabin boy. Rich as we are in Biography, says Carlyle, a well written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one and there are many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it. In Southeys Nelson we have Carlyles ideal. Southey, it has been said, wrote out of the fulness of knowledge, and his was that rarest gift of good, pure English. The Life of Nelson belongs to universal literature. ROBERT SOUTHEY ROBERTS OUTHEYpreceded Wordsworth as Laureate, but was a much better prose writer than poet. Son of a Bristol draper, he was born August 12, 1774, went to Westminster School, thence to Oxford, where he made acquaintance with Coleridge. Fired by the French Revolution, he and Coleridge became republicans and formed, with their friend Lovell, a scheme for renouncing the old world and founding an ideal colony in the wilds of Susquehanna. They made a beginning by marrying three sisters the scheme collapsed for want of capital, and later, when Lovell was dead, and Coleridge absorbed in his opium dreams, the three sisters lived together under Southeys generous roof. Most indefatigable of authors, he had published an early volume of poems with Lovell, written while at college an epic, Joan of Arc, which he sold for fifty guineas, and followed these with Wat Tyler, a revolutionary dramatic poem, and much miscellaneous verse...