reatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and
Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His big
Oriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama," are written in verse
purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of
Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only
tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not when
it is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, his
indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose
make him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poetical
reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater
contemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented
boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are
manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet,
represents nothing in particular.

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. Neverthel