SOURCE: “From an Historical Religion to a Religion of History: Robert Southey and the Heroic in History,” in CLIO, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter, 1980, pp. 229-52.

In the following essay, Meachen discusses Southey's role as a “romanticist” historian and compares his work to that of his contemporary Sharon Turner.

In one of his imaginary conversations, Walter Savage Landor has Robert Southey say that “we must see through many ages before we see through our own distinctly.”¹ Landor's characterization of Southey is insightful: no one in the early Nineteenth Century strove harder to see through many ages and many civilizations, and few sought more diligently to apply what they had learned to the problems of contemporary society. History remained an abiding passion for Southey, more enduring even than the poetry for which he is remembered. Though he was a prolific historian, biographer, and reviewer of histories, his historical work has been...