Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
National Library of Wales, MS 4812D. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I shall not visit London till the end of March or the beginning of April. Then indeed if you were in Wales I should very gladly rest myself with you on the way.
Your Xmas I hope is a merrier one than mine. The Influenza has thought proper to make me in the fashion – I have been
ill this fortnight, & now when recovering Edith is just seized with it. It has left me miserably weak – tomorrow I begin a course
of bark.
Have you ever looked in Fordun?
I am sorry to say that I am as impatient to get out of my own country as other people are to return to it. – but the
fault is in my constitution. I am as susceptible of climate as a green-house plant, & xxxx shall fairly be nipped at
root if I do not get into a favourable aspect.
–—————
y 2.
Three days have mended me, tho I have not yet fairly resumed my usual course of life.
I have found out matter of comfort in the campaign. That as the end was to be so thoroughly ruinous, it is better that
it should be settled speedily than be ten years about, like the last war, because we shall have so much the less to pay for it. I
confess I have been miserably deceived – I did hope that such a confederacy might have been done something, notwithstanding
Fox’s prescience. As it is I do not think the issue will be eventually
disastrous to Europe, tho undoubtedly its immediate consequences will. Bonaparte is now what Charlemagne
England meantime has a plain straight-forward course to pursue. To let the continent alone – let the West Indies alone
– take the Cape – take the Mauritian & the xxx French E. Indian Isles – & take Egypt. In short take whatever we can,
& keep all we take, always avowing that we will never give up anything at peace – & that we are ready to make peace whenever
France our enemies please. Our squadrons & cruisers should be increased so as fairly to sweep the seas, – & the
people armed at home, boys being trained to arms, as a regular part of school education. Then let the French come if they can, &
they will find the shore as fatal as the sea.
Have you read Thiebaults Anecdotes of Frederic the Great?xxxxxx may be called probable by prophecy.
y 3. 1806.
Tell me what you think of my proposed alteration in Madoc.