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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Peninsular War, already noted among his other historical and biographical writings was, to all intents and purposes, superseded by Sir William Napier’s work on the same subject (1828–40).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, 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.