The two brothers were in those days in continual intercourse with Southey and Wordsworth.
He was intimate with Southey, who spoke of his knowledge of the Middle Ages as marvellous, and he was in close correspondence with Lingard, the historian, who was godfather to one of his sons.
Reginald Southey (1835 – 1899), English physician; nephew of Robert Southey
The foolish judgments of Lord Eldon about one hundred years ago, proscribing the works of Byron and Southey, and the finding by the jury under a charge by Lord Denman that the publication of Shelley's "Queen Mab" was an indictable offense are a warning to all who have to determine the limits of the field within which authors may exercise themselves.
"All who know him," says Southey, writing in 1830, "are very much attached to him." "Nowhere," says Johnston, speaking of his correspondence during his wife's hopeless illness, "has the writer of this memoir ever seen letters more distinctly marked by manly sense, combined with almost feminine tenderness." Matthew Arnold in his Stanzas in Memory of Edward Quillinan, speaks of him as "a man unspoil'd, sweet, generous, and humane."
The British writers Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor, and Robert Southey handle the legends associated with these events poetically: Scott in "The Vision of Don Roderick" (1811), Landor in his tragedy Count Julian (1812), and Southey in Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814).
This return to writing was promoted by the poet Walter Savage Landor who encouraged Southey to complete the epic along with writing the work "Pelayo, the Restorer of Spain".
Southey told romantic tales of many cultures around the world, including India, Rome, Portugal, Paraguay, and Native American tribes, all of which were based on accounts of others’ travels, and his own imagination.
Doubtless this was fuelled by the Romantic landscape paintings of Turner, Constable and Friedrich and by the works of the Lake District's very own poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.
By the middle of the 19th century, trocar-cannulas had become sophisticated, such as Reginald Southey's invention of the Southey tube.