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ROBERT SOUTHEY

The Life of Nelson

Robert Southey, man of letters and poet-laureate, was born at Bristol on August 12, 1774, and received at various schools a desultory education, which he completed by an idle year at Oxford.  Here he became acquainted with Coleridge; and Southey, who had practised verse from early boyhood, and acquired a strong taste for the drama, being also an ardent republican and romanticist, was easily enlisted by the elder poet in his scheme for a model republic, or “Pantisocracy,” in the wilds of America.  They married two sisters, the Misses Fricker, and a third sister married Robert Lovel, also a poet.  The experiment of pantisocracy was fortunately never carried out, and Southey’s career for the next eight years was exceedingly fragmentary; but in 1803 there was a reunion of the three sisters at Keswick, though one of the husbands, Lovel, was dead.  Here Southey entered steadily and industriously on the life of an author for livelihood; it was by no means unremunerative.  Southey’s output of work, both prose and verse, was very voluminous, and its quality could not but suffer.  He was appointed poet-laureate in 1813; and received a government pension of L160 a year from 1807, which was increased by L300 a year in 1835.  He died on March 21, 1843.  In a prefatory note to that peerless model of short biographies, the “Life of Nelson,” which appeared in 1813, and is considered his most important work, Southey describes it as “clear and concise enough to become a manual for the young sailor, which he may carry about with him till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart.”

I.—­A Captain at Twenty

Horatio, son of Edmund and Catherine Nelson, was born on September 29, 1758, in the parsonage of Burnham Thorpe, a Norfolk village, where his father was rector.  His mother’s maiden name was Suckling; her grandmother was an elder sister of Sir Robert Walpole, and this child was named after his godfather, the first Lord Walpole.  Mrs. Nelson died in 1767, leaving eight children, and her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, R.N., visited the widower, and promised to take care of one of the boys.

Three years later, when Horatio was twelve years old, he read in the newspaper that his uncle was appointed to the Raisonnable, and urged his father to let him go to sea with his Uncle Maurice.

The boy was never strong, but he had already given proofs of a resolute heart and a noble mind.  Captain Suckling took an interest in him, and sent him on a first voyage in a merchant ship to the West Indies, and then, as coxswain, with the Arctic expedition of 1773, when Horatio showed his courage by attacking a Polar bear.

A voyage to the East Indies followed, and gave him the rank of midshipman.  But the tropical climate reduced him almost to a skeleton; he lost for a time the use of his limbs, and was sent home as his only chance of life.  He returned under great depression of spirits.  In later years he related how the despair was cleared away by a glow of patriotism, in which his king and country came vividly before his mind.  “Well, then,” he exclaimed, “I will be a hero, and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger!”