SOURCE: "Southey and Wordsworth," in Sketches in Nineteenth Century Biography, 1930. Reprint by Books for Libraries Press, 1970, pp. 71-84.

In the following essay, Feiling presents Southey's and Wordsworth's often criticized transformation from liberalism to conservatism as a shift based on the two poets' desire to safeguard democracy for future generations.

When George the Magnificent was Regent and King, Southey as Poet Laureate was official head of English letters, and in common, even in uncommon opinion, best represented the Lake school. To the Disraeli of 1833 he seemed "the greatest man of the age," to Byron or Hazlitt he was the arch-apostate; high and dry Anglicanism reckoned him as chief pillar of the Church. Except for a few duty Odes, produced not without assistance from doses of magnesia, he had abandoned poetry, but his achievement in prose was ceaseless, omniscient, and formally almost perfect. It would be hard to find purer...