The Quarterly Review was launched by George Canning in 1808 as an antidote to the Edinburgh Review, which he considered to be defeatist in its attitude towards Napoleon. Southey's views on the Spanish uprising against Bonaparte, which had begun earlier that year, and the need for Britain to support it, coincided with Canning's. The editor of the new journal, William Gifford, therefore approached him through Grosvenor Bedford, a mutual friend, asking him to contribute to it. It was ironic that Canning and Gifford had previously lam-basted the poet in the Anti-Jacobin in the 1790s, when they singled his verse out as specimens of ‘Jacobin’ poetry. But his politics had become much more conservative since then. His former pacifism, for instance, had been transformed into a vigorous call to arms against the threat from France. Now Southey agreed to write for the periodical, but with conditions. While he welcomed the opportunity to back the war effort, he was not prepared to become a government hack and support all its policies. As he put it to Bedford he wanted it to be made clear to Gifford that

Nevertheless he was ‘an enemy to any further concessions to the Catholics’. If the ministry introduced Catholic Emancipation, therefore, and required the Quarterly to support it, he would stop contributing to it.

Southey preferred to write reviews of books rather than overtly political essays. He had reviewed an eclectic range of titles in the Annual Review, to which he had contributed since 1802, only ending his contributions when the Quarterly was launched. The Annual was divided into several sections, such as ‘Voyages and Travels’, ‘Theology’, ‘History, Politics and Statistics’, ‘Geography’, ‘Poetry’ and ‘Biography’.