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. Previously published: Nicholas Horsfall, ‘Four Unpublished Letters of Robert Southey’, Notes and Queries, 22.9 (September 1975), 401–402.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt
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I have ordered to your address in Pall Mall, the third volume of
Brazil, the life of Wesley,ex officioamende honorable, much more ought to be so when the amende
dishonorable is made by his antagonist, – the words which he denies having
uttered, having been reported in the newspapers, & heard by many thousand
witnesses, of whom some half-dozen repeated them to me. – I print the extract for the
love of Gog,
to whom I owe more than this, & in whose debt it is not my intention to die. The
rest of the fragment you shall see in the summer, – it is written forcibly, &
would have made a good companion to my tender epistle to Mr William Smith.
Secondly concerning the Brazil. Do not bind your set, till I send you
some corrections & additions for the first volume, which is now reprinting.
The Dean of Worcestersuch it, after it has come to my
knowledge.
You will find me a good deal altered, – for I feel the effect of Time
in more ways than one, – physically in an infirmity which will probably (& God
knows how soon) incapacitate me for walking, if it does not do more;xx morally, in nothing so much, as in certain anxious thoughts, to
which in younger days I was a stranger, concerning my ways & means, as I grow
older, & a decay of power is to be apprehended, or any of those accidents which
flesh is heir to. It is only now that I have first a prospect of accumulating any
property during my life, & that slowly. Ten years would probably make me master
of as many thousand pounds, – but who can calculate upon ten years! certainly not I.
These thoughts however do not recur very frequently, neither do they leave any deep
impression, – but I know that ten years ago I was a stranger to them, & that they
belong to the decline of life. Decline of mental power I am not sensible of in any
other way, than that I continue now to be a poet rather by profession than by
choice.
In the course of a few weeks I shall send you a thin quarto which
will provoke a good deal of hostility, & some difference of opinion.