3801. Robert Southey to David Laing, 20 February 1822

Address: To/ David Laing Esq^re/ Edinburgh
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298
Postmark: FEB/ X 21 N/ 1822
MS: Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections, The Laing Collection. ALS; 3p.
Previously published: Geoffrey Bullough, ‘Southey and David Laing’, Times Literary Supplement, 1681 (19 April 1934), 282 [in part].

Keswick. 20 Feb^y. 1822

Dear Sir

The Quaker books

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have arrived safely, – I thank you for their use, & shall be more glad to thank you personally when you call for them on your road. You must give me a day, that I may show you some of the beauties with which this place is surrounded.

I was glad to see the Latin edition of Croesius, having only an English translation;

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of Barclay also I had only the English apology,

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& an account of his Life & Writings published in 1802.

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The adoption of Hac Ebn Yokdan by the Quakers

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is a curious fact with which I was not previously acquainted; Quaker Missionaries of this temper would make converts in Persia, & in Hindostan, – wherever mysticism & naturalism are to be found. Barclay seems to me to have saved the Quakers, – before this time they hardly knew what they believed; & as upon principle they spoke & wrote without thinking, they often in pure absence of thought uttered expressions from which the worst consequences deduced by their adversaries were fairly inferred, – fairly as respected the words, but wrongfully as respected men in their state of mind.

Tell me if a letter to Cambridge will be of use to you. I have a friend there – a fellow of Peter House, who I am sure will be very glad to render you any facilities, & show you any attentions in his power, – & I can frank you the letter by sending it six hundred miles round.

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What a state of society does it imply, when this only occasions a delay of three or four days!

I am glad you like Kehama,

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which both as regards the structure of the verse & of the story, is the most original of my poems. But my career as a poet is almost at an end. If I compleat two poems which have been been several years in hand,

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it is not likely that I shall ever begin another. Solve senescentem &c.

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Fare well my dear Sir
& believe me yours faithfully
Robert Southey

What you say of the hexameter

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was Wordsworths objection to it twenty years ago, – that the beginning of the line was not sufficiently metrical, – the end of it too much so. – Yet in his judgement as well as mine, the practicability of naturalizing this metre is proved by the experiment. I shall like to show you the scene which is faithfully described in the first page, – from the window of this room.

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Notes

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

2. Gerard Croese (1642–1710), Historia Quakeriana (1695), no. 767 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library. It was translated as The General History of the Quakers (1696), no. 393 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library.[back]

3. Robert Barclay (1648–1690; DNB), An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1678), no. 174 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library. The book was originally published in Latin in Amsterdam in 1676.[back]

4. Joseph Gurney Bevan (1753–1814; DNB), A Short Account of the Life and Writings of Robert Barclay (1802), no. 343 in the sale catalogue of Southey’s library.[back]

5. Ibn Tufail (c. 1105–1185), Hayy ibn Yaqzan (early twelfth century), is an allegorical tale in which a boy who grows up alone on a desert island attains great wisdom purely from studying nature, and deduces his own system of beliefs, including monotheism and vegetarianism. The book was translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus (1671) and English as The Improvement of Human Reason (1708). It was mentioned in Robert Barclay’s An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (London, 1678), p. 134, as proof that a person could attain ‘a profound knowledge of God’ by ‘a conjunction of the mind of man with the Supreme Intellect’.[back]

6. i.e. by sending the letter to London, to be franked by one of Southey’s friends in government service, such as John Rickman, or Grosvenor Charles Bedford, who would then send the letter on to Laing in Edinburgh.[back]

7. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810).[back]

8. Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay (1825); and his unfinished ‘Oliver Newman’, set in New England. A fragment was published posthumously in Oliver Newman: a New-England Tale (Unfinished): with Other Poetical Remains by the Late Robert Southey (London, 1845), pp. 1–90.[back]

9. A contraction of ‘solve senescentem mature sanus equum’, meaning ‘a wise person would put his aged, broken horse out to pasture’, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC), Epistles (20 BC), Book 1, Epistle 1, lines 8–9.[back]

10. David Laing had criticised Southey’s use of hexameters in A Vision of Judgement (1821).[back]

11. Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (London, 1821), pp. 1–2; stanza 1, lines 1–21 of the poem described the view from Southey’s window.[back]

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The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven