3788. Robert Southey to Henry Herbert Southey, 27 January 1822

Address: To D^r Southey/ 15. Q. Anne Street/ Cavendish Square/ London
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298
Postmark: E/ 31 JA 31/ 1822
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Don. d. 4. ALS; 3p.
Unpublished.

Keswick 27 Jan^y. 1822.

My dear Harry

I hope your children

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are not seriously ill. Indeed as you speak of them all together, I persuade myself that they have some epidemic or infectious complaint.

Can you tell x me how to remedy in its commencement a very unpleasant a weakness of the eyelids, which I well know may in its consequences be very distressing. About tea time Kate finds her lids disposed to close of themselves, they fall xxx half over her eyes, & she rubs them to keep them up, – the affection having nothing to do with drowsiness, – but evidently a weakness or relaxation of the muscles. I rub the lid with camphorated spirits of wine

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& send her to bed early. Can I use any tonics, – local or general?

I have had a good deal of trouble in finding out the name of the frame maker. It is M^r W Haines 3 Boyle Street, Saville Row.

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The drawings of my Aunt Mary, Tom, Edith May & Cuthbert, should be framed alike, in plain gilt frames, such as poor Nash preferred. The two miniatures

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each in a case.

Except in the affair of Kates eyes which I hope may be remedied by being taken in time, we are going on well. Edith I think is in better health & spirits than she has been for many years, – a few months ago she was in worse, so as to give me very serious apprehensions. Edith May has still the same some kind of eruption – (by the by the lancet never arrived) – I hope we shall have an opportunity of sending her to Harrowgate ere long with Miss Hutchinson.

My book of the Church

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is in the press, & I have lately made, – - guess what? – eight conundrums, – which may be seen at his Majestys Exchequer.

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Lord B. if he calls me into the ring again,

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will find me an ugly customer. I dare say he will be at me again, & shew plenty of Devil, – but shew as much as he will I shall get his head into chancery,

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& weave away at him. – You remember the nursery song of the Pedlar & the Little Old Woman, how He cut her petticoats up to the knee – ?

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This is what I have done to him, – I have cut his trowsers up to the ankle, & shown the cloven foot. – I have had two letters from strangers to thank me for what I have done.

Love to all – God bless you –

RS.

How is Mary-Anne?

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Notes

1. Robert Southey Jnr (b. 1817); Charles Gonne Southey (1819–1861), later an army officer in India; and Louisa Mary Southey (1821–1824). [back]

2. Camphor dissolved in wine that had been repeatedly distilled. It was a widely used remedy, including for forms of palsy. [back]

3. William Haines (1778–1848, DNB), painter and engraver whose studio was at 3 Boyle Street, Savile Row, London. [back]

4. A miniature of Southey; and one of Edith May Southey and Sara Coleridge. Both were bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery in 1957. [back]

5. Southey’s The Book of the Church (1824). [back]

6. Eight punning descriptions of the names of Greek authors; see Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 26 January 1822, Letter 3784. [back]

7. 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. Southey had responded by writing to the Editor of the Courier, 5 January 1822, Letter 3776. This appeared in the Courier on 11 January 1822. [back]

8. A hold in which a boxer gripped his opponent’s head under one arm and hit his face repeatedly. It was named after the travails of pursuing a legal case in the Court of Chancery. [back]

9. ‘The Old Woman and the Pedlar’ appears in the collection of fairy tales and nursery rhymes first published in English as Histories or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose (1729). In the tale, the peddler finds the woman asleep by the road on her way to market and, while she sleeps, steals her petticoats by cutting them ‘up to the knees’. [back]

10. Mary Anne March, née Gonne (b. 1792), sister of Henry Herbert Southey’s wife. She was married to Thomas March (1781–1859), a member of a merchant family trading with Portugal. [back]

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Notes

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven