3847. Robert Southey to Henry Herbert Southey, 27 May 1822

Address: To/ D^r Southey./ 15. Queen Anne Street/ Cavendish Square/ London
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298
Postmark: E/ 30 MY 30/ 1822
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Don. d. 4. ALS; 3p.
Unpublished.

My dear Harry

The pictures arrived safely,

⁽¹⁾

– the frames are very ill made as you will perceive when you see them beside those which they ought to have resembled – & the wrong portrait of Edith May has been framed, being an unfinished one. This however can be remedied when the other arrives. You must trouble Bowyer

⁽²⁾

with a note if he does not send back the miniature

We shall all rejoice to see you in the autumn. It is no wisdom to put off enjoyments of this kind, which the accidents of life may so easily interfere to embitter or prevent. I hope you may find Aunt Mary here, she talks of returning to us – but I am very anxious about her at this time, for she tells me she is under preparation for having one of her eyes couched,

⁽³⁾

– xx where one eye alone is affected I am afraid the operation ought not to be hazarded, – & yet I cannot venture to tell her this, & alarm her, so much in this case depending upon the tranquillity of the patient. – Lord Lonsdale gave his operator

⁽⁴⁾

the other day 1000 guineas. I wish you were his physician.

EMay is just gone off for Harrowgate, whither I purpose going to bring her home about the end of next month. We are afraid that Kates complaint is not removed, care has been taken to spare the eyes at night, so that they have not fairly been put to the proof. I suppose we must repeat the doses of calomel if the heaviness decidedly returns.

⁽⁵⁾

When you go into the city, call at Longmans & desire him to send you the Brazil.

⁽⁶⁾

Ask also for Aguirre,

⁽⁷⁾

& the small edition of the Carmina,

⁽⁸⁾

if they were not sent to you. Tillbrooke

⁽⁹⁾

has written a book against my hexameters; – a service undoubtedly this may be, but it is not the kind of service one expects from an old acquaintance. I suspect am afraid nobody will think it worth while to enter into a controversy with him xxx nor even to read what he has to say upon such a subject.

I see the end of my first volume,

⁽¹⁰⁾

which will be a bulky one. I have obtained some very interesting communications from Whittingham,

⁽¹¹⁾

thro B. Frere. This work will make me as popular among the Buonapartists in France as I am among the Whigs in England. I am thinking of dedicating it to Lord Sidmouth,

⁽¹²⁾

for motives which cannot be misapprehended now that he is no longer in office.

My poems are seldom touched – yet a fourth part of Oliver Newman

⁽¹³⁾

is written, & a third of the Tale of Paraguay.

⁽¹⁴⁾

I must rouse myself to the task & compleat the latter. Both satisfy me well as far as they are advanced.

You will do me a great service if you send me a good pen-knife by John May. Love to all

God bless you
RS.

Keswick. 27 May. 1822.

Notes

1. Portraits of the Southey family made by Edward Nash. Southey had sent them to London for framing.[back]

2. The artist and publisher Robert Bowyer (1758–1834) was working on a painting, ‘View of the Interior of the House of Lords, during the important investigation of 1820’, and wished to include Southey in the crowd in the Strangers Gallery in the House of Lords. Southey had lent him a miniature painted by Edward Nash in 1820 (now in the National Portrait Gallery); see Southey to Henry Herbert Southey, 4 May 1821, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Six, Letter 3681.[back]

3. A hazardous procedure to treat a cataract by using a sharp instrument to push the cloudy lens to the bottom of the eye.[back]

4. Henry Alexander (d. 1859), fashionable eye surgeon, with a large practice in London’s West End; he specialised in cataract operations.[back]

5. Calomel was a commonly used purgative.[back]

6. The second edition of the first volume of Southey’s History of Brazil (1810–1819).[back]

7. The Expedition of Orsua; and the Crimes of Aguirre (1821), originally intended to be part of the History of Brazil and first printed in Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1810, 3.2 (1812), i–l.[back]

8. A combined second edition of Carmen Triumphale (1814) and Congratulatory Odes. Odes to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Russia, and His Majesty the King of Prussia (1814), published as Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814: Carmen Aulica, Written in 1814, on the Arrival of the Allied Sovereigns in England (1821).[back]

9. Samuel Tillbrook, Historical and Critical Remarks upon the Modern Hexametrists, and Upon Mr Southey’s Vision of Judgment (1822), a critique of Southey’s Vision of Judgement (1821). The only debate this pamphlet provoked was when Southey published extracts from his reply to Samuel Tillbrook, 17 June 1822, Letter 3856, in his Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), IX, pp. xviii–xxi.[back]

10. The first volume of Southey’s History of the Peninsular War (1823–1832).[back]

11. Lieutenant General Sir Samuel Ford Whittingham (1772–1841; DNB), a British soldier who served with Spanish forces in the Peninsular War 1808–1813.[back]

12. Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth (1757–1844; Home Secretary 1812–1822; DNB). The work was eventually dedicated to George IV.[back]

13. Southey’s 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]

14. A Tale of Paraguay (1825).[back]

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The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven