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National Library of Wales, MS 4812D . Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 150–152 [in part].
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.
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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.
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When your letter arrived I was dining with Dickenson whom I had not seen till that day, since you & I supt at his
rooms in January 1792.xxxxxxxx
xxx returned to my memory. He tells me Combe has taken orders without any
preferment or chance of any, & without even a curacy to give him employment. He lives with his mother, & his main delight is in
taking care of the flower garden. Poor Majesty! – I hunted for him without success when last in London. In hopes of shaking him by the
hand again, tho the next minutes feeling would have been the painful one that he & I who had once lived years together in the most
thorough intimacy could not now find matter of common interest enough for half an hours conversation.
The Quarterly has struck root, & will grow better every number for some time to come. I am in odd company & not
the most congenial, – but far more so than the Edinburgh would have been. For the politics of Brougham & Jeffray are to
me the more hateful for the mixture of good which now & then appears in them. Both these men are such thoroughly unprincipled
politicians that xxxxxxx xxxxx the public mind xxxx could not be worse guided. They set out xxx
<with> that precious definition of war which you will remember, – they xxx are now the cowardly advocates for peace.
They wrote in defence of the whole system of corruption against Cobbett while
their party was in power, & they write Jacobinism as soon as their friends are out again. Cobbett may by possibility not be a
rascal because he set out with the worst opinions in the world, & has ever since been getting farther & farther from them. But
for these men there is no such saving possibility – they are every thing, or all things – with a view to their own advancement. I
thought those articles upon the Conscription, & the Revolutionary Biography could not come from any ordinary works in that Journal.
They were in so much wholesomer a stream of thought & feeling, – & I find accordingly they appear to be the work of
an American by name Walsh.
In the third number you will see Holmes’s American Annals
You a little surprize me by what you say of Bedford. Did you understand what species of humour I meant? It was Rabelais’
vein, in which it is my full opinion that Grosvenor would exceed him & all other men.that! –) – You
perhaps are less acquainted with Butlerology than I am.xxxxxx I verily believe that it is in Grosvenors power to burst out at once into a reputation surpassing that of any other
man in what may be called the grotesque sublime, – far infinitely far beyond Rabelais, whom I have lately been reading with some
disappointment. – Elmsley I believe agrees with me in this opinion of Bedfords peculiar talent, – respecting his other powers I think as you
do.
I do not perceive the difficulty about Lobaba, – the column of sand was ‘driven by the breath of God’.xxxxx piety, – spared by a
wild beast,xx <so> much so as to
render a specific spell necessary. That bridleless steed
There are seven volumes xxx published of Aikins
Biography, & two more will probably compleat it. Of my handy work what little there is in is in the two last volumes,xxx I do any thing. – having so much <many other things>
to do.