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.
. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 296–299 [misdated 4 November 1811].
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.
Senhora I am going to abuse you. As for the sin of keeping my pantaloonsby waggon to be forwarded by waggon from
Manchester. A good cheese is too good [a] thing to be lost, especially by a man who lives in the very worst cheese country in
England.
I have laughed Senhora, – rather chuckled heartily while I was reading your hypothesis concerning Clarissa.
What I would have said to Mr. Listerall which she bequeathed to him should be printed, & that twelve years should elapse before the last
portion appeared. Her evident reason for this latter request was that some persons whose feelings will now be hurt (Col. T.
Constable was afraid of Jeffray about these letters, & for that
reason put them into the hands of Mr Morehead,
I wish you could have made for me of that marvellous tree a little cabinet to hold my manuscripts, – about three feet high, & proportionably wide, – with shelves to hold three tiers of mss. – that is to say two shelves. It may stand at the bottom of the room against the great bookcase.
Dr. Bell is here – the best of all good men. I read him only one sentence of your
letter, & he is half in love with you for it. You must know that I am about to reprint my article from the Quarterly
concerning the New System of Education, & to enlarge it,
I get on with Pelayo,
Remember that the cheese comes by waggon, – by waggon, – by waggon. & if you have in your shop a brass contrivance to hold a lamp send it with the other brasses. Make my
respects to Sir Edward – & Write a little more frequently yourself Senhora,
– & then you may have the better reason to complain of me. God bless you. R. S.
Next week you will have the Imperial C. at Teddesley. If you were to guess these hundred years you would never guess what I am about
to do tomorrow. – Nothing less than to draw up instructions with Dr Bell for a system
of education to be introduced into every regiment throughout the army!