3851. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 4 June 1822

MS: National Library of Wales, MS 4813D. ALS; 3p.
Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), II, pp. 236–237.

My dear Wynn

I thank you heartily for your last kind note. You may be sure that your silence had excited no surprize; your leisure for letter-writing must now be much less than mine, which is little enough.

Both Coleridges sons are beyond the age at which they could have benefitted by your kindness.

⁽¹⁾

They are no burthen to me, – since they went to College their means of support have come from other quarters. The eldest with extraordinary abilities is turning out deplorably ill; the other will I dare say do better; we hear well of him hitherto.

Gifford is looking forward to the necessity of finding a successor for himself in the management of the Q. R. I do not imagine that either he or Murraylemagne have a thought of me; yet if it were made worth my while, so as to offer me the certainty of an income adequate to my expenditure, I should <might> think seriously of fixing myself near London, when, next year, I must give notice whether I mean to enter upon the third term of my lease.

⁽²⁾

Whether I wish it or not is a different question. But I am growing old, & have sometimes cause to wish that my subsistence were less precarious.

I have not seen Milmans two last productions.

⁽³⁾

Samor was an unwieldy, ill-constructed poem, full of power & promise, – just what was to be wished from an aspirant. The Jerusalem I thought ominous. That is a subject which no man who saw & felt it as he ought, would venture to treat. I should as soon think of writing another Paradise Lost

⁽⁴⁾

as of describing the destruction of Jerusalem after Josephus.

⁽⁵⁾

It is not only the most aweful, but it is also the impressive part of <event in> all history.

My first vol. of the War

⁽⁶⁾

is nearly finished, but it lingers in the printers hands. The sketch of our religious history

⁽⁷⁾

will not be long in following it, & if I can succeed in composing a sketch of our political history to form a companion volume, I may effect some good, by giving young minds a right bias in time, which is perhaps the greatest good that can be done.

⁽⁸⁾

I asked you in a former letter if you thought a paper upon Welsh antiquities in the QR. would be any way serviceable to the objects of the Cymrydorion?

⁽⁹⁾

Of course I should take care to state that it came from one who was not acquainted with the language & likewise take care to have it overlooked by Turner, lest any mistake should arise from that ignorance.

God bless you my dear Wynn
Yrs affectionately
RS.

I am sweltering at 8 in the evening, without my coat. The glass has been at 84 to day.

June 4^th 1822

Notes

1. Wynn had written on 28 May 1822, offering a cadetship at Addiscombe Military Seminary to one of Coleridge’s sons, with the proviso that they must be between fourteen and twenty-two years old. The Seminary trained officers for the East India Company’s army. As Wynn was President of the Board of Control he had the authority to nominate cadets to Addiscombe.[back]

2. Southey’s lease of Greta Hall, Keswick, where he had lived since 1803. He signed a twenty-one year lease in 1809.[back]

3. Henry Hart Milman’s Samor, Lord of the Bright City: an Heroic Poem (1818) and The Fall of Jerusalem: a Dramatic Poem (1820).[back]

4. John Milton (1608–1674; DNB), Paradise Lost (1667).[back]

5. Titus Flavius Josephus (AD 37–c. 100), Books of the History of the Jewish War against the Romans (75), which related the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.[back]

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

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

8. Southey did not write this companion work.[back]

9. The letter containing this proposal does not seem to have survived. Wynn had played a central role in re-founding the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in 1820 as a society of London-based Welshmen interested in the history of Wales. Southey was elected a member in 1821. He did not write on Welsh antiquities for the Quarterly Review.[back]

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The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: Part Seven