The Book of the Church

London: John Murray, 1825. Third edition. Leather Bound. Very Good. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches. 2 vols. Vol. 1: 407 numbered pages. Vol. 2: 511 numbered pages. All edges gilt, bookplate of Edward Wickham. Pages bright and clean. Bound in full black morocco with gilt edging and Georgian style gilt decoration to boards. Spine with five compartments separated by raised bands with gilt decoration, slight loss to heads and tails of spines, and some loss of color to spine leather. Old repair to front hinge of Vol. 2. A nicely bound edition of this popular history.Robert Southey (1774 – 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843. Although his fame tends to be eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse enjoys enduring popularity. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to literary history is the immortal children's classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story, which first saw print in 1834 in Southey's prose collection, The Doctor. Southey is also credited with penning the popular children's nursery rhyme What are Little Boys Made of? around 1820. Many of his poems are still read by British schoolchildren, the best-known being The Inchcape Rock, God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop, After Blenheim (possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems) and Cataract of Lodore. In 1837, Southey received a letter from Charlotte Bronte seeking his advice on some of her poems. He wrote back praising her talents but also discouraging her from writing professionally. He said "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life...". Years later, Bronte remarked to a friend that the letter was "kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good". Southey introduced or popularised a number of words into the English language. The term 'autobiography', for example, was first used by Southey in 1809 in the Quarterly Review in which he predicted an 'epidemical rage for autobiography', which indeed has continued to the present day. Southey was also a noted liberal voice. He discussed with Coleridge and others setting up an idealistic community in America (a "pantisocracy"):