The doctor, &c., vol. 5 (of 7)

About this book

Robert Southey’s fifth volume of The Doctor, etc. is a discursive prose miscellany, moving among stories, literary judgments, and moral reflections for a general readership. Among its turns, the narrator gives Nobs the horse an extravagantly elaborate account of his birth and naming before returning to plain prose. On Spenser, Southey argues that changing the old spelling would damage the poem’s rhyme and character without helping readers who can already follow its language. Later, imagined voices from a fighting cock and a duck challenge the idea that human care is a kindness when it ends in confinement or slaughter.