The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.

II. Historians, Biographers and Political Orators.

§ 53. Southey.


Southey’s History of the Peninsular War, already noted among his other historical and biographical writings 62  was, to all intents and purposes, superseded by Sir William Napier’s work on the same subject (1828–40). Napier, in the words of his biographer, 63  had himself “nobly shared in making a history which he afterwards so eloquently wrote.” Yet his book, while containing passages of magnificent élan, by reason of its lengthy and general method of treatment survives chiefly as a military history, in which character it has few competitors in our literature. 64    88

Note 62. Barante, too, in his Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne, presents himself as under the same influence. Cf. the entire sec. III of bk. V of Fueter, E., Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (1911). [ back ]
Note 63. Cf., ante, Vol. XII, p. 113. [ back ]
Note 64. Cf., ante, Vol. XI, p. 184. [ back ]