* MS: Untraced; text is taken from John Feltham, A Tour Through the Island of Mann (1798)
Previously published: John Feltham, A Tour Through the Island of Mann, In 1797 and 1798; Comprising Sketches of its Ancient and Modern History, Constitutions, Laws, Commerce, Agriculture, Fishery, &c. (Bath, 1798), p. 124.
Note on text: the letter survives only as one sentence, extracted from a letter sent by Southey to Feltham and included in the latter’s Tour. Feltham’s publisher was Richard Cruttwell, who had also issued Southey and Robert Lovell’s Poems (1795). BACK

[1] Southey’s observations echo a short passage added to the second edition of his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (Bristol and London, 1799), p. 55: ‘We passed one of those mills, common in this country, with a horizontal wheel. I thought its effect finer than that of a perpendicular one, perhaps from not being accustomed to it, perhaps from the simplicity of the building, and its situation.’ BACK