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Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro; text taken from Sousa-Leão. Previously published: Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, ‘Cartas de Robert Southey a Theodore Koster e Henry Koster, anos de 1804 a 1819’, Revista do Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro, 178 (1943), 47–49.
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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& has been used for the ampersand sign.
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Your letter gives me the greatest pleasure, far greater than if it had told me of the accomplishment of your military schemes. In that case a secret upbraiding would have accompanied you thro life, for no man ever yet sacrificed his duty to his inclinations without paying the penalty of repentance, unless his nature were compleatly brutalized and perverted. I am sure you will be a happier man than if you wore a red coat, I think you will be both a wiser and a better one. You will have enough leisure, and you know how to employ it.
If your journal
We reached home just in time before the snow began. Edith May
appeared to recover strength and spirits as she drew nearer the mountains, and her native air and usual habits of life have
produced all the amendment we could expect or wish. We found all well, and Herbert
had gone on as diligently with his German testament
Two packages of my books have reached London. The one Mrs. Vardon tells
me is from Ghent, and the other has the Acta Sanctorum.
There is an impudent interpolation in the last Quarterly,
I have been busily employed upon my poem which is to be called The Poets Pilgrimage to La Belle Alliance.
Remember me to your father and mother and sister.