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.
Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c. 24. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 417–419.
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 had an Oxford Sausage oncexxxx exertions from them as much out of their way – as it would be out of mine to open a ball at court.
xxx To a pleasanter subject. It is you who are mistaken about the Butler. Whoever knows you well Grosvenor knows that your
talent is for humour, & of this extravagant character. You were trained up at Westminster in the way which you should go. Other
things you may learn to do well – but not excellently; this you can do inimitably well by merely following your own genius, – I think
you can do it better than any person before you, & that you may take the first place, without danger of ever being superseded. Put
the book togetherm Nicol
I know not how the second cargo of Espriella
Thank you for the quotation about Deicide– the word of course signifies both crime & criminal
like Parricide.
Wynns marriage gives me very great pleasure.
_________
When you & I dispute about poetry we argue from different premises. I wish you would buy the Lyrical Ballads
You will not see me in London so early as you expect. I hope to drink Wynns health on upon the bridal day – which is not long!
I had forgotten my friend Dr Dodd. You are right enough about the joke, which perhaps is none even
to you yourself. say what you will about him or leave it <for> me on my arrival at your own pleasure – something should be said
to this purport, that he was a rascal – but that it is to be hoped the country will not long be disgraced by so many executions for
xxxxxx forgery.the one – because a long poem written by a man
who is going to be hanged is a curiosity – & secondly – because there is portrait <print> of Dr Dodd in a full-bottomed wig receiving a visit from an Angel in Newgate.
I shall write our Preface