Unlike most of the English Romantics, who wrote predominantly either in verse or in prose, Robert Southey--like his friend and brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, to some extent, Walter Scott--was both poet and prose writer and one as fully as the other. Of his fellow Romantics he was perhaps the most versatile, as well as one of the most prolific. As poet--and eventually poet laureate--he produced epics, romances, and metrical tales, ballads, plays, monodramas, odes, eclogues, sonnets, and miscellaneous lyrics. His prose works include histories, biographies, essays, reviews, translations, travelogues, semifictional journalism, polemical dialogues, and a farraginous work of fiction, autobiography, anecdote, and omnium-gatherum that defies classification. His bent was inherently encyclopedic; and, while his writings lack both moral profundity (as distinct from moral fervor) and "natural magic," they compensate by their vigor and abundance for their dearth of genius. Coleridge rightly called him the complete man of...