4153. Robert Southey to John Rickman, 10 March [1824]
Address: To/ J Rickman Esqre
MS: Huntington Library, RS 447. ALS; 2p.
Unpublished.
Dating note: Year is supplied by the Huntington Library catalogue.
My dear R.
I find that Simon Stylites
Simeon Stylites (c. 390–459 AD), saint, who lived for 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo, Syria.
adopted a mode of devotion practised in his own country by Heathen devotees. – substituting a decent column for a colossal Priapus, – to the phallus whereof they were hoisted up! The passage occurs in his account of the Syrian Goddess.
Lucian of Samosata (AD c. 125–after 180), De Dea Syria, describing the cult of the goddess Atargatis at Hierapolis Bambyce in Turkey. Twice a year an acolyte would climb up one of the giant phalluses standing at the entrance to the main temple and remain there for a week, receiving gifts and offering up prayers.
Do you know that not less than a tenth part of all the lead annually extracted from all the mines in the world, – is consumed in small shot here in England! 5000 tons – out of 50,000!
Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 series (London, 1849–1850), IV, p. 396. Southey’s source was Edward Hawke Locker, Report on the State and Condition of the Roads and Mines on the Estates of the Greenwich Hospital, in the Counties of Cumberland, Durham, and Northumberland, with Suggestions for their Improvement (London, 1823), Part 2, ‘Mines’, p. 2.
RS.
10 March.
