Southwell, Robert, poet, born in Norfolk; studied at Douay, and became a Jesuit priest; came to England as a missionary, was thrown into prison, tortured ten times by the rack, and at length executed at Tyburn as a traitor for disseminating Catholic doctrine; his poems are religious chiefly, and excellent, and were finally collected under the title “St. Peter's Complaint,” “Mary Magdalen's Tears, and Other Works”; “The Burning Babe” is characterised by Professor Saintsbury as a “splendid poem” (1560‒1595).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Southwark * Souvestre, Émile