3782. Robert Southey to David Laing, 12 January 1822

Address: [in another hand] London Twenty Seven Jany/ David Laing Esqr/ Edinburgh/ Fm/ J Rickman
Postmark: FREE/ 22 JA 22/ 1822
MS: Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections, The Laing Collection. ALS; 4p.
Previously published: Geoffrey Bullough, ‘Southey and David Laing’, Times Literary Supplement, 1681 (19 April 1934), 282 [in part].

Dear Sir

I am much obliged to you for Alexander Scott,

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& much pleased (among other things) to see with how much taste & success the stone-engraving has been used to revive the good old fashion of embellished title pages. These early poets, when they have ceased to live as poets, retain a value of which no time or fashion can deprive them, – to them we must always go when the history of our language, ma[MS obscured] opinions is to be elucidated. We of this generation have not the same hol[MS obscured]terity; if our vessels are not sea-worthy they will never be preserved by their [MS obscured].

Your Quaker Collections cannot be more despicable in manner & matter than the great mass of Quaker books.

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But I have little doubt of gleaning something from them, Quakerism owes much to Scotland, tho it obtained little footing there; it is curious that no foreign seeds of schism seem to prosper in that country, tho the soil has been sufficiently favourable to those of home growth.

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– Barclay,

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more than any other man, licked George Fox’s crudities into shape.

No attacks of Lord Byron can do me any injury, or give me any disquietude.

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What I said of him & his Satanic school was written from a sense of duty, & I have never written any thing on which I look back with greater satisfaction.

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I am sorry you think the fiction of the poem irreverent, – for this I suppose is your objection to it. There is no reasoning against a feeling of that kind, & there ought to be none. I respect it too much to reason against it. I was aware that it would exist in some instances, tho I believed not in many, & I very well knew that it would be feigned in some cases where it was not felt. The trials which I made of the poem in private all served to shew that others considered it as I did, objectionable on no other account than that of relating to too recent an event.

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– This certainly was a great objection, I neither apprehended myself, nor did those persons to whom it was communicated, apprehend for me, any other, upon the score of the fiction.

The result of the metrical experiment

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has been very much as I expected. Women (without an exception to <in> my knowledge) have fallen readily into the cadence & been pleased with it. Young poets have liked it enthusiastically. Among men of a certain age some have declared an invincible dislike, some have said it was not so objectionable as they thought it would have been, not a few have been pleased with it, – & perhaps the greater number have waited for the opinion of others, prepared to praise or blame according to the voice of public criticism. For myself I am glad that (reluctant as I am to the task of composing verses) I roused myself to make the experiment. It will be judged hereafter without prejudice, – or with a prejudice in its favour. Time will lessen the objection to the fiction, by removing farther from us the reality of the event on which it is built. And it will one day be acknowledged that of all writers who have ever held my office,

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or written what may be called court poems, no one ever offered so much exhortation (not to say advice) – or so little praise, – & that praise, so free from adulation.

Look for example at the last piece in the second volume of my Minor Poems.

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It was written for a New Years Ode. A person in office to whom it was shewn told me it was not proper that Washington should be praised in a poem written ex officio by the Poet Laureate.

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I judged of the King more worthily than to suppose that he would be of this opinion, – & I judged more truly of him also. You have seen how Washington is introduced in the Vision of Judgement,

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& the King has twice sent me word that he was very much pleased with that poem.

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– Do not let what I have here said get into print, to become part of the gossip of the day.

I know not whether I observed to you, when thanking you for Montgomerys Poems that the fashion of Flyting was imported from France,

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where it was carried to the greatest perfection of abuse, & sometimes in good earnest.

I think you undervalue Scotts paraphrase of the 51 psalm

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– part of which appears to me to have been written with great force & feeling. – Let me not forget to say that the copy which you have sent me wants the imprint which I find mentioned p. 96

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farewell Dear Sir & believe me with many thanks Yrs faithfully

Robert Southey.

Keswick. 12 Jan^y. 1822.

Notes

1. David Laing, Poems by Alexander Scott. From a Manuscript Written in the Year MDLXVIII (1821), no. 2522 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library. This was an edition of the works of the Scottish poet, Alexander Scott (c. 1520–c. 1582/3; DNB). [back]

2. Laing had offered to loan Southey some books to help with his projected, but unrealised, life of George Fox (1624–1690; DNB), founder of Quakerism. [back]

3. The established Church of Scotland had suffered a series of breakaways, including the Reformed Presbyterians in 1689, the Associate Presbytery in 1733 and the Presbytery of Relief in 1761. Scotland, however, contained few members of the Nonconformist denominations popular in England, such as the Congregationalists and Baptists. [back]

4. Robert Barclay (1648–1690; DNB), Scottish Quaker and writer. [back]

5. 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 him to have later spread were rumours that Byron and Shelley had engaged in a ‘League of Incest’ during their residence in Switzerland in 1816. [back]

6. A Vision of Judgement (London, 1821), ‘Preface’, pp. xvii–xxii, where Southey denounced ‘the Satanic School’ of modern poetry without naming any one poet. However, this was clearly a riposte to Byron’s Don Juan (1819), whose suppressed ‘Dedication’, mocking Southey, had circulated widely. [back]

7. A Vision of Judgement was written as a commemoration of George III (1738–1820; King of Great Britain 1760–1820; DNB), who had died on 29 January 1820. The poem described the judgment of the monarch’s soul in the afterlife. [back]

8. A Vision of Judgement was written in hexameters. [back]

9. Southey was Poet Laureate 1813–1843. [back]

10. ‘Ode, Written in December 1814’, Minor Poems, 3 vols (London, 1815), II, pp. [225]–238. This was originally written as Southey’s New Year Ode for January 1815 in fulfilment of his duties as Poet Laureate. For a full account of its suppression and replacement with a (now lost) ode celebrating the end of the war with America, see Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811–1838, gen. eds Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols (London, 2012), III, pp. 77–82. [back]

11. At lines 10–12 Southey had complimented George Washington (1732–1799; President of the United States 1789–1797) as ‘A light for after times!’. [back]

12. A Vision of Judgement (1821), stanza 6, lines 14–50, presented a very favourable picture of George Washington, and asserted his ‘place was with ancient sages and heroes’ (line 21). [back]

13. George IV expressed his gratitude for A Vision of Judgement (1821) through Sir William Knighton, who had presented the book to the King (see Southey to Knighton, 30 March 1821, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Six, Letter 3661), and to Henry Herbert Southey, whom George IV encountered at a levée (see Southey to John Rickman, 18 May 1821, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Six, Letter 3687). [back]

14. Laing had sent Southey a copy of The Poems of Alexander Montgomery: with Biographical Notices by D. Irving (1821), no. 1981 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library. Southey had thanked him in a letter of 29 August 1821, Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Six, Letter 3720. Southey had indeed expressed this opinion of the origin of ‘flyting’ in this letter. He was, however, quite wrong. The custom in early modern Scotland of poets exchanging insults in verse, as a public entertainment, originated in Norse and Anglo-Saxon culture. [back]

15. Poems by Alexander Scott. From a Manuscript Written in the Year MDLXVIII (Edinburgh, 1821), ‘The fyifty[first] psalme’, pp. 2–4. [back]

16. Poems by Alexander Scott. From a Manuscript Written in the Year MDLXVIII (Edinburgh, 1821), p. 96, directed the reader to the ‘elegant border for the imprint, at the close of the volume’. Southey here complains that his copy lacked this final page showing the imprint. [back]

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Notes

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven