Robert Southey

The Life of Horatio, Lord Nelson (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

CHAPTER I

1758 - 1783

Nelson's Birth and Boyhood—He is entered on Board the RAISONABLE—Goes to the West Indies in a Merchant-ship; then serves in the TRIUMPH—He sails in Captain Phipps' Voyage of Discovery—Goes to the East Indies in the SEAHORSE, and returns in ill Health—Serves as acting Lieutenant in the WORCESTER, and is made Lieutenant into the LOWESTOFFE, Commander into the BADGER Brig, and Post into the HINCHINBROKE—Expedition against the Spanish Main—Sent to the North Seas in the ALBERMARLE—Services during the American War.
HORATIO, son of Edmund and Catherine Nelson, was born September 29, 1758, in the parsonage-house of Burnham Thorpe, a village in the county of Norfolk, of which his father was rector. His mother was a daughter of Dr. Suckling, prebendary of Westminster, whose grandmother was sister of Sir Robert Walpole, and this child was named after his godfather, the first Lord Walpole. Mrs. Nelson died in 1767, leaving eight out of eleven children. Her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, of the navy visited the widower upon this event, and promised to take care of one of the boys. Three years afterwards, when HORATIO was only twelve years of age, being at home during the Christmas holidays, he read in the county newspaper that his uncle was appointed to the RAISONNABLE, of sixty-four guns. "Do, William," said he to a brother who was a year and a half older than himself, "write to my father, and tell him that I should like to go to sea with uncle Maurice." Mr. Nelson was then at Bath, whither he had gone for the recovery of his health: his circumstances were straitened, and he had no prospect of ever seeing them bettered: he knew that it was the wish of providing for himself by which Horatio was chiefly actuated, and did not oppose his resolution; he understood also the boy's character, and had always said, that in whatever station he might be placed, he would climb if possible to the very top of the tree. Captain Suckling was written to. "What," said he in his answer, "has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea?—But let him come; and the first time we go into action, a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once."

Produktdetails

• Verlag: CAIMAN
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9789881831606
• Artikelnr.: 58957106

Autorenporträt

Robert Southey, an English Romantic poet, served as Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Southey, like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, started out as a radical but gradually grew more conservative as he came to admire Britain and its institutions. Other romantics, including Byron, accused him of siding with the establishment for financial and social reasons. He is best known for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". Robert Southey was born in Wine Street, Bristol, to parents Robert Southey and Margaret Hill. He attended Westminster School in London (where he was expelled for authoring an essay in The Flagellant, a periodical he founded that attributed the creation of flogging to the Devil), as well as Balliol College in Oxford. Southey arrived at the University of Oxford with "a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon . He subsequently stated of Oxford, "All I learnt was a little swimming and a little boating".