3497. Robert Southey to John Taylor Coleridge, [c. 24 June 1820]
3497. Robert Southey to John Taylor Coleridge, [c. 24 June 1820]*
My dear Sir
Your scheme [1] seems to me a useful one, & likely to serve a booksellers purpose. I shall not see Longman again before I leave town. But I can write to him at any time when your plan is mature: x or you may refer him to me, tho I believe he knows enough of youxx to need neither reference nor recommendation.
With regard to S.T.C. it is certainly proper that he should know the situation in which Hartley stands. [2] Any thing however which affects him acts so directly upon his bodily health that on that account it may perhaps be better to make the communication thro the Gillmans. [3]
My brother is out, & the Excursion is locked up. [4] – I go this evening to Streatham & shall return on Tuesday morning: that afternoon & the next morning you may find me if you should be passing this way.
in haste
Yrs faithfully
Robert Southey.
Saturday afternoon.
Notes
* Address: To/ J. T. Coleridge Esqre
Endorsement: 1820/ June 24th/ R.
Southey. London.
MS: British Library, Add MS 47553. ALS; 3p.
Previously
published: W. Braekman, ‘Letters by Robert Southey to Sir John Taylor Coleridge’,
Studia Germanica Gandensia, 6 (1964), 115. BACK
[2] John Taylor Coleridge had been told by the clergyman and poet John Keble (1792–1866; DNB) that his cousin Hartley Coleridge had lost his Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, on 30 May 1820, the end of his probationary year, on the grounds of intemperance. John Taylor Coleridge had then forwarded Keble’s letter to Southey, who had to break the news to Hartley’s mother and friends in the Lakes. BACK