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Beinecke Library, Chauncey Brewster Tinker MS Collection, GEN MSS 310, Box 13, folder 552. Previously published: Lynda Pratt, ‘Interaction, Reorientation, and Discontent in the Coleridge Southey Circle, 1797: Two New Letters by Robert Southey’, Notes and Queries, 47.3 (2000), 314–321.
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.
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Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
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I thank you for Chapelain.
I thank you also for your good opinion of me. I would fain be thought well of by the “ten righteous men”,is would be incredible to you & I if experience did it not prove such ferocity frequent,
but the most dreadful reflection is that this man was doing his duty! what the world call — his
duty!
It is for the sake of society that I would secede from it. it must be many years before this can be practicable, & I look with a very feeble hope to a period so distant. a thousand obstacles may prevent me. the course of nature or the tempest of revolution may sweep me away, or the few individuals who would commit themselves with me to that little Ark. I suffer no gloomy presages to disturb the tranquil happiness with which God has blest me now, & which I know how to value because I have felt what it is to want every thing except the pride of a well satisfied conscience.
the Sister & niece of Chattertonrs Newton in
comfort during the last years of her life.
Cottle brought with him the new edition of Coleridges poems,
You know not how infinitely my happiness is increased by residing in the country. I have not a wish beyond the quietness I enjoy. every thing is tranquil & beautiful — but sometimes I look forward with regret to the time when I must return to a city which I so heartily dislike. Edith is much better here than in town. I must not forget again to remember her to you.
If your brother will send the drawing by Joy,
The Captaina Captains enough to compose one, in that to which my brother will go, if every good
quality can carry a young man there.
God bless you.