Читать книгу Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey - Richard Holmes - Страница 14

To his great surprise, the biography immediately made Southey’s own career. Its patriotism caught a public mood, and he was offered the Poet Laureateship that autumn (on the generous recommendation of Walter Scott). His position with his publishers and the Quarterly Review was assured, and Murray later urged him to write Lives of two other notable warriors, first the Duke of Wellington, and then the Duke of Marlborough. He wrote extended essays on both for the Quarterly, as he had with Nelson; but finally–and perhaps wisely–he turned down both ideas—in Wellington’s case with the pointed comment that biographies of living persons were impertinent. He did however write an enormous, erudite and worthy three volume History of the Peninsular War (1823—1832), which has sunk without trace.

To the end of his career, Southey remained intrigued by the more introspective aspects of the form, and what biography could tell us about an inner life. He later wrote long and thoughtful Lives of John Wesley (1820), John Bunyan (1830), and the poet William Cowper (1835). They have striking passages, such as the moment when the boy Wesley is dramatically–and symbolically–saved from a house fire, ‘a brand plucked from the burning’. Yet none of them have the narrative flair and the instinctive passion of his portrait of Nelson, whom he once described in an inspired moment truly worthy of a Poet Laureate, as ‘the hero, the darling hero of England’.