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.
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 404–408.
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 omitted to notice the heavy loss you sustained in Mr Wakefieldxxxxx discriminating. – You ask me for an inscription, – the successful one I conjecture will come from
Dr Aikin ; a likely man – from family & friendly feelings to attempt one,
& a likely one to succeed in it. The lapidary style is of all others the most difficult, – I have a volume
written upon it by a German – but it is not here, & I have never yet read it. In my own judgement the shorter such things are the
better, – all cannot be said upon stone, some gain comprehension therefore should be aimed at, – not
discrimination. I would enter his character at length in the register ‘by special desire of his Parishioners’ – & inscribe the
stone with something to this purport
This Monument is erected
by
The Inhabitants
of
Richmond
in grateful & honourable remembrance
of
Thomas Wakefield
Their Excellent Pastor.
The full character would be equally copied from the register as from a monument into Magazines & County Histories,
x from its unusuality it would have a better chance of being read, & the circumstance of its being so placed would
ensure belief for it, which marble, having so long been taught to tell lies, could hardly expect. – Your loss in such a man must indeed
be serious, & there is little hope that it can be replaced.
I thank you for your fears least I should alter a plan deliberately formed, for the sake of temporary advantage, &
so injure it. Such however will not be the case, – nor indeed is there any temporal advantage which could ever induce me in any of my
own literary plans to depart, in the slightest degree, from what I believed to be the best possible way. Portugueze History naturally
& necessarily falls into three great divisions – that of the Mother Country & of the East Indies Asiatic Conquests,
& of Brazil. Barroseven needed
authority for my sanction. But their to divide the subject was the first advice my uncle gave me, & as soon as I got acquainted with my materials I perceived that
they could not be disposed of otherwise without an endless confusion, – of which – if you have read La Cledebefore because those events are inseperably connected with home politics, on which the colonies & other conquests
had no other effect whatever than what the revenues which they sent home produced.
The Brazilian history therefore is as distinct from that of the Mother Country as if it had no connection with it,
& the only circumstance in which it will not be quite so compleat as if the other parts had been published is, that it is my
intention in each part to give an account of the authors referred to, their lives biographical & critical; & there
will be a few quoted here of whom the accounts must be in the other parts, Joan de Barros for instance, & Antonio Galvano,
You will perceive from this explanation that your friendly fears are causeless.
We are going upon a wrong plan with respect to South America, & a ruinous one, –which must occasion a tremendous
effusion of blood sooner or later, & inevitably to our ultimate defeature.never were
th always to be behind hand with the people in wisdom, & never to adopt sound principles of conduct till long after
all thinking men had considered them as axiomatic.
I am hurrying my printer with Don Manuel,some a good deal of my mind poured out on subjects of some importance. But my limits have been
too constrained, & the book would ha[MS torn] been better if it had suited me to have extended it to a fourth volume. The most
compleat part will be the view of the different religious sects in the country – in which I think no former historian of heresies has
equalled me, St Epiphanius
Herbert grows finely, & if it were for the Tartar-shaped eyes which all my
children have – I cannot divine by what right of inheritance – he would be a beauty. I tell my daughter that she is like my old books, – ugly, but good; – tho sometimes sad to say
the latter part of the simily is not so accurate as the former. All her perceptions & feelings are so fearfully quick, that I am
never without a dread of their that some tendency to organic disease occasions this exquisite acuteness. Thank God she is
well as yet, & as strong as if she were own child to Hercules or Samson, before he had his hair cut.
In my last, I recommended to you the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinsonr Jarrolds Dissertations on Man in reply to the abominable book of
Malthus
Edith joins me in remembrances to Mrs May. You have perhaps seen his Doctorship by this time – as he knows where & when you are visible.