Address: To/ G.C. Bedford Esqre
Endorsement: 6th. Jan.ry 1822./ with Lr. on L Byron/ to the Courier.; 6 Janry 1822
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c. 26. ALS; 3p.
Unpublished.
Note on MS: The original enclosure, Southey to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822, Letter 3776, is no longer with the letter to Bedford because the latter forwarded it to the newspaper, where it appeared on 11 January 1822.
If you have read Lord Byrons note,
(1)
In the ‘Appendix’ to ‘The Two Foscari’, Sardanapulus, A Tragedy. The Two Foscari, A Tragedy. Cain, A Mystery (London, 1821), p. 328, Byron had cautioned: ‘I am not ignorant of Mr. Southey’s calumnies on a different occasion, knowing them to be such, which he scattered abroad on his return from Switzerland against me and others.’ Southey had visited Switzerland in his continental tour of May–August 1817. The ‘calumnies’ Byron believed Southey to have later spread were rumours that Byron and Shelley had engaged in a ‘League of Incest’ during their residence in Switzerland in 1816.
you will rather admire the temper in which I have answered it, than think any thing which I have said is too severe.
(2)
Southey to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822, Letter 3776. The letter appeared in the Courier on 11 January 1822.
He has literally blackguarded me. But this Avenger of Abel
(3)
In Genesis 4: 1–16, Abel was murdered by his brother, Cain. Southey probably means that Byron had tried to justify Cain by writing Cain, A Mystery, but the poem was so disreputable it had instead avenged Abel.
will find me the ugliest customer he ever has ever ventured to deal with. If he compels me to return to the attack tant mieux,
(4)
‘it is a good thing’.
I will lay him on the dissecting table, read a lecture upon morbid anatomy, & demonstrate upon the living subject. I am as compleatly master of my temper, as his temper is master of him.
I saw the passage in a Whig-Radical paper published at Kendal, – no doubt all the provincial papers of that party will publish it.
(5)
Westmorland Advertiser and Kendal Chronicle, 29 December 1821. Byron’s criticism of Southey in his ‘Appendix’ to ‘The Two Foscari’ had been widely published in opposition newspapers, including the Morning Chronicle, 19 December 1821, and the Examiner, 726 (23 December 1821), 810.
Before this reply of mine appears in the other Kendal paper; I shall desire them to insert the attack, & the passage from my Preface.
(6)
Southey got his wish. On 12 January 1822 the Westmorland Gazette (‘the other Kendal paper’) printed both Southey’s denunciation of ‘the Satanic School’ of modern poetry from A Vision of Judgement (London, 1821), ‘Preface’, pp. xvii–xxii; and an extract from Byron’s attack on Southey in the ‘Appendix’ to the ‘Two Foscari’. Southey’s response to the latter, his letter to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822, Letter 3776, was then printed in the Westmorland Gazette, 19 January 1822.
Some good passages have been struck out from the first draught of this reply, for the sake of keeping close to the subject. They may serve for after use. In one of them I had wiped my friends Jeremy the Merry Bentham,
(7)
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832; DNB), philosopher and social reformer. In one of his drafts of the letter to the Courier, now Huntington MS 6655, Southey had commented: ‘The egregious & incomparable Jeremy,<ever Jeremy the Merry-Bentham> equipped in full motley, has shaken his bells at me, erected his ancient cockscomb, and crowed in triumphant <exultant> defiance. Sir Tarquin the Table-Talker still slavers out his malevolence as freely as if he were quite certain I should never publish a tale in illustration of the old proverb Save a Thief from the gallows <which tells me what he xxx xxxx criminal…
& Sir Tarquin the Table-Talker. All in good time. – You will like what is said of Jeffrey.
(8)
The review of Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (1821) in Edinburgh Review, 35 (July 1821), 422–436, had accused Southey of ‘a puny spite at those who dissent from his present creed in politics, and of a lamentable soreness at the success of those who have laughed at his affectations, or eclipsed, by their superior talents, his former fame as a poet’ (422). Southey responded by accusing Jeffrey, the Edinburgh Review’s editor, and author of this article, of ‘pitiful malevolence’; Southey to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822, Letter 3776.
I shall now amuse myself with writing an answer to a challenge in case he should send me one, – which I should like well.
(9)
Byron asked his friend Douglas Kinnaird (1788–1830; DNB) to deliver a challenge to Southey on 7 February 1822. Wisely, Kinnaird did not carry out this instruction.
I had one ready for Brougham at the last election.
(10)
See Southey to Henry Peter Brougham, [c. July 1818], The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Five, Appendix 2. On 30 June 1818, during his general election campaign, Brougham had criticised Southey from the hustings at Appleby. Southey debated at length whether to make a public riposte to him – but in the end did not. He also fantasised about what he would do should he receive a challenge to a duel from Brougham. His jokey response to this possibility is published in Appendix 2.
No praise which has reached my ears ever pleased me half so much as an expression of Mrs Piozzi’s in a letter, after she had read my tender Epistle to Wm Smith, – it was this – Oh how I delight to see him trample upon his enemies.
(11)
Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821; DNB) to Reynold Davies (1752–1820), 29 April 1817, The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale), eds Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, 6 vols (Cranbury NJ and London, 1989–2002), VI, p. 87. This was Hester Piozzi’s response to Southey’s A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P. (1817). Southey had been shown her letter on his trip to London that year; see Southey to Thomas Southey, 5 May 1817, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Five, Letter 2986.
– Poor old Lady, had she been alive now, she would have seen me trample upon the Avenger of Abel in better style than St George does upon the dragon in the crown piece.
(12)
The reverse of the silver crown coin (worth five shillings) had, since 1818, carried an engraving of St George defeating the dragon, designed by Benedetto Pistrucci (1783–1855; DNB).
I am very anxious to hear of your own official affairs. –
God bless you
RS.
