The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 193

Although he never mentions Robinson, Southey’s defense of

Coleridge may be accurate: that is, it was not Coleridge’s debility that

occasioned his first contributions but Robinson’s. Southey did not

announce his appointment to his friend Charles Wynn until April,

but he was on the job as early as the end of January of 1798. This

is when Stuart actively promotes Southey and Robinson together.

For instance, on January 27, Stuart announces the rejection of an

implicit defense of Southey called “English Sapphics,” referring to

the Anti- Jacobin’s parody of Southey’s “The Widow,” with face-

tious irony: “that Publication being too contemptible for notice.”

In the same issue, he extracts a passage from Walsingham on Bristol

that also obliquely invokes Southey. And then, for confirmation of

this, on February 12, an item declares, “Bristol is remarkable as the

birth- place of POETIC GENIUS: The names of CHATTERTON, Mrs.

ROBINSON, Mr. SOUTHEY, Miss MOR E, and Mrs. YEARSLEY, will

prove the assertion.” Stuart also reprints Robinson’s ballad “The

Doublet of Grey,” again from Walsingham, making an explicit con-

nection to Southey. Stuart’s headnote draws attention to “the Alonzo

meter,” referring to the ballad that appears interpolated in Lewis’s

The Monk, to prepare readers for the forthcoming Southey poem

“The Ring,” the composition of which may have been prompted

by the reprinting of “The Doublet of Grey,” also in “the Alonzo

meter,” and Stuart’s praise of it. By the end of February, a week after

the last poem of the first batch appeared, the Morning Post reported

that “Mrs. Robinson is sufficiently recovered from her late illness,

to resume her literary occupations” and a week later that “Mrs.

Robinson and Mrs. Inchbald are both again absorbed in literary

avocations.” I can only speculate about the veracity of these reports,

and suggest tentatively that they are some kind of publicity shield

for Tabitha Bramble. More concretely, these reports suggest to me

that Robinson is hard at work on the series of “Poetical Pictures”

that began appearing on April 7, and which would become her long

poem The Progress of Liberty.

Robinson only intermittently publishes original poetry in the

Morning Post during Southey’s laureateship. The “Poetical Pictures”

appeared anonymously and ran in six weekly installments until 18

May 1798. As the title of the reconstituted poems, The Progress of

Liberty, indicates, the poems are liberal, humanitarian, and opposi-

tional; moreover, these poems demonstrate Robinson’s proficiency

working in blank verse, if they also hearken back to the impassioned

elaborate diction characteristic of her early verse, a stylistic ten-

dency that was quickly to become outmoded.^18 On 17 April, Stuart

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