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First edition, 12mo, pp. xviii, [2], 199, [1]; engraved frontispiece and one engraved plate by Westall after Heath; original pink paper-covered boards, printed paper label on spine; extremities rubbed, binding a little soiled, else very good. Bookplate of Simon Nowell-Smith on the front pastedown. "At the age of fifty - some five years after A Vision of Judgment and thirty years after Joan of Arc, the works that had, respectively, undone and made him as a poet - Southey published the last of his long poems, A Tale of Paraguay. Almost his poetic swan song, the Tale is probably the least known of his more substantial verse narratives, and in some ways it is the least characteristic. It has none of the extravagance, the 'wild streaming lights' of the romances and none of the sentimental melodrama of the epics. There are no struggles against insuperable odds, no wicked sorcerers, fanatical priests, or monstrous tyrants, and no heroes of superhuman piety and fortitude. In fact, as the Preface stresses, the poem is hardly fictional at all, since it merely retells, in metrical and only moderately embellished form, a factual story Southey had come across in his researches for the History of Brazil in the Historia de Abiponibus by the Austrian Jesuit Aloysius Dobrizhofer. It is altogether a surprising performance to come from the poet whom Wordsworth, in the dedication of Peter Bell, had addressed as the dean of romancers" (Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest, "Southey in the Tropics," Wordsworth Circle, volume 5, no 2, p. 97).
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