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MS has not survived. Previously published: Monthly Magazine, 7 (May 1799), 283 [from where the text is taken] under the pseudonym ‘T. Y.’ New attribution to Southey.
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
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Perhaps the following method of assisting a weak sight may not be commonly known. I translate it from La Nouvelle Bigarure for February 1754.
“The author of this discovery was about sixty years of age; he had almost entirely lost his sight, seeing nothing but a kind of thick mist, with little black specks which appeared to float in the air. He knew not any of his friends, he could not even distinguish a man from a woman, nor could he walk in the streets without being led. Glasses were of no use to him; the best print, seen through the best spectacles, seemed to him like a daubed paper. Wearied with this melancholy state, he thought of the following expedient.
“He procured some spectacles with very large rings, and taking out the glasses substituted in each circle a conic tube of black Spanish copper. Looking through the large end of the cone he could read the smallest print placed at its other extremity. These tubes were of different lengths, and the openings at the end were also of different sizes; the smaller the aperture the better could he distinguish the smallest letters; the larger the aperture the more words or lines it commanded, and consequently the less occasion was there for moving the head and the hand in reading. Sometimes he used one eye, sometimes the other, alternately relieving each, for the rays of the two eyes could not unite upon the same object when thus separated by two opaque tubes. The thinner these tubes, the less troublesome are they. They must be totally blackened within so as to prevent all shining, and they should be made to lengthen or contract, and enlarge or reduce the aperture at pleasure.
“When he placed convex glasses in these
tubes, the letters indeed appeared larger, but not so clear
and distinct as through the empty tube: he also found the
tubes more convenient when not fixed in the spectacle-rings;
for when they hung loosely they could be raised or lowered
with the hand, and one or both might be used as occasion
required.”