Robert Southey

Robert Southey
1774-1843
portrait by Pieter Van Dyke
oil on canvas, 1795
(London National Portrait Gallery, Room 18)
no copyright infringement intended

Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called Lake Poets (a group of English poets named so by the Edinburgh Review only to be uniformly disparaged; actually each of them was quite different of the others), also a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer. His biographies include John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. He was also a renowned scholar of Portuguese and Spanish literature and history, translating a number of works from those two languages into English.Originally a radical supporter of the Great French Revolution he became in time a staunch conservatory (few are those who age gracefully).

(source: Robert Southey, comments: mine)

(Pieter Van Dyke)

(A Life in Books)