17. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, [c. 9 July 1792]

17. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, [c. 9 July 1792] *
so much my dear Bedford for the Drs tail. & now in plain sober prose I am much obliged to you for your ode which I like very much. but why will you translate? it is a servile employment & not worthy of you. you want a metre you say for your next. you know Parnells Fairy tale? [24] but I am the worst person to apply to as all my odes are irregular except Ignorance [25] which you have. Grays Spring & drownd cat [26] are pretty I think — but I am not regular myself & detest regularity.
I hope all your friends are well. make my compliments & thank Mr Reed. [27] remember <me> to little Joseph. I wrote him a serious epistle the other day & desir’d an English answer — do make him write — I fear after all he will sink into an editor like Brunck [28] unless you can find some means to rowse him — is it not horrible that such a Genius should do nothing but write Latin? if you see Lamb remember me to him & his Majesty I shall write them soon. but my time is much taken up. since ten this morning I have never laid the pen down & it is now past one. this is not idle — but Vincent would say so as all my writings are English. write soon.
Notes
* Address: G C Bedford Esqr/ Old Palace Yard/
Westminster
Stamped: BATH
Postmark: BJY/ 9/ 92
Watermark: [Obscured by MS binding; possibly W S]
MS: Bodleian
Library, MS Eng. Lett. c. 22. AL; 4p.
Unpublished. BACK
[2] The artist and caricaturist Henry William Bunbury (1750–1811; DNB), father of Southey’s school friend Charles John Bunbury. BACK
[4] Joseph Boruwlaski (styled Count Boruwlaski) (1739–1837; DNB), travelling performer and memoirist. He was 3 feet 3 inches tall. BACK
[7] Daniel 4: 32 relates how Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylon 605–562 BC, received the prophecy that his kingdom would fall and he would ‘eat grass as oxen’. BACK
[9] Southey’s authorship of the fifth issue of The Flagellant (29 March 1792), which claimed flogging was an invention of the devil and parodied the Athanasian creed, caused a scandal and led ultimately to his expulsion from Westminster School. BACK
[10] Tippu Sultan (1750–1799), Sultan of Mysore 1782–1799, defeated by the East India Company and killed at the battle of Seringapatam, 1799. BACK
[13] Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742–1811; DNB), Home Secretary 1791–1794, and political ally of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the Younger (1759–1806; DNB). BACK
[14] Robert Merry (1755–1798; DNB), poet whose work had been parodied by Southey in a letter to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, [c. 31 May 1792] (see Letter 11). BACK
[15] The house, laboratory and library of the scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestley (1733–1804; DNB) were destroyed during the Birmingham riots, July 1791. BACK
[16] Thomas Paine (1737–1809; DNB), Common Sense (1776), a key tract in support of the American Revolution. BACK
[17] In 1788, Samuel Horsley (1733–1806; DNB) was appointed Bishop of St David’s. The theologian Samuel Badcock (1747–1788; DNB) had not been paid to write for Horsley, but was reputed to have accepted £500 from Joseph White (c. 1746–1814; DNB) for writing White’s Bampton lectures on Christianity and Islam. BACK
[18] Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792), had been suppressed by the government earlier in 1792. BACK
[19] Edmund Burke (1729/30–1797; DNB), politician and author of Reflections Upon the Revolution in France (1790) which had lamented the passing of the age of chivalry. BACK
[24] Thomas Parnell (1679–1718; DNB), ‘A Fairy Tale, in the Ancient English Style’ (1722). It is written in sestets of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. BACK
[26] Thomas Gray (1716–1771; DNB), ‘Ode on the Spring’ (1748) and ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’ (1748). BACK