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.
Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Not previously published.
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.
By some accident, which is a very unusual one with me, your last letter was mislaid, & this vexed me when I wished
to answer it. I remember however a very friendly invitation, for which we thank you now, & by of
which we hope one day to avail ourselves when Margaret shall be grown
big enough to be a play fellow for your little girl.
When last I wrote we were in treaty for a house in Walesnever since
then I have been on the look out & hitherto without success. we have now a house in view about three miles from Bristol, a spot
with some inconveniences, but some advantages also, & great beauty of situation.
Have you received the copy of Chattertonsubscribers copies, else the benefit will not be Mrs Newtons.
The books &c that you may still be troubled with of mine have the goodness to direct here, & they will then
travel with the rest of my lumber in one embarkation to my place of rest – wherever that may be. In about three months time,
calculating by my printers speed I also shall have some books to send you – a version of Amadis of Gaul;xx you some specimens, with which I
feel confident you would be pleased.
Colonel Despardsx had been talking treason than conspiring, prating about what might or could be, not plotting what should be, playing with a halter till he was caught in the noose. I wish he had been spared, because tho his former
offerings services were no fair plea for pardon upon such an occasion, his former sufferings were:
oppression maketh a wise man mad, & it should have been remembered that Colonel Despard had been the most oppressed man in his
Majestys dominions. his pardon would have given administration a character for clemency which is always advantageous. however to their
credit they saw none of that wanton cruelty in the whole proceedings which the old ministry eternally exercised. Portland &
Grenville & Pitt
In spite of Sebastianisalmost all the sacrifice of almost all my candle light
hours this winter. I am trespassing now & sparing them by this straggling hand – yet still they smart & itch & warn me of
my imprudence. Edith & Tom desire to be remembered. remember me also to your mother & Mr Coleman