But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreign literature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulating in the English tongue.  In his two visits to the Peninsula he made acquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by his translations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of the old legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalry and romance.  Mention has already been made of his versions of “Amadis of Gaul,” “Palmerin of England,” and the “Chronicle of the Cid.”  The last named was not a translation from any single source, but was put together from the “Poem of the Cid,” which the translator considered to be “unquestionably the oldest poem in the language” and probably by a writer contemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose “Chronicle” assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southey thought mainly worthless, i.e., from the historical point of view.

Southey’s long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partly historical, partly legendary, “Joan of Arc” (1795), “Madoc” (1805), and “Roderick, the Last of the Goths” (1814), like his friend Landor’s “Gebir,” are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, unromantic handling.  The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, with Landor’s drama, “Count Julian.”  I have spoken of “Thalaba” and “The Curse of Kehama” as epics; but Southey rejected “the degraded title of epic” and scouted the rules of Aristotle.  Nevertheless, the best qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind.  The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished; and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste.  But the spell of romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are the glow and movement of Scott.

Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and his notes present a formidable array of authorities.  While engaged upon “Madoc,” he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to leasing a cottage and taking up his residence there.  “The manners of the poem,” he asserted, “will be found historically true.”  The hero of “Madoc” was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a colony to America.  The motif of the poem is therefore nearly the same as in William Morris’s “Earthly Paradise,” and it is curious to compare the two.  In Southey’s hands the blank verse, which in the last century had been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes.  In the Welsh portion of “Madoc” the historical background is carefully studied from Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans’ “Specimens,” the “Triads of Bardism,” the “Cambrian Biography,” and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of modern travellers in America.  In “The Earthly Paradise” nothing is historical except the encounter with Edward III.’s fleet in the channel.  Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance.  Yet the imaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality, but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript.