1256. Robert Southey to Charles Danvers, 4 January 1807
1256. Robert Southey to Charles Danvers, 4 January 1807 *
My dear Danvers
On recollection I am not sure that there are more than four Volumes of Wesleys Journal, [1] – so that box may be sent without delay, & the sooner the better, as D Manuel [2] waits for some <of> its contents – –
I hope you will not have much difficulty in hitting the books for the second box – as they are all of conspicuous size & easily distinguishable – There are two others which I will add to them, as there is yet time. one, is one of the little quartos, – the square foreign form, half bound & Juniperized [3] at full length along the back thus
A Book of the Things from the West Indies
the other is Charlevoix’s Histoire du Paraguay, [4] three thin quartos in French binding. To the best of my recollection these will compleat my whole stock of materials relating to Brazil, which are at Bristol.
I think John Perrot the servant of the Lamb is wrapt up in paper in the little box with the Pocket Books. [5] by the by those Pocket Books may be sent.
Coleridge & Hartley are in Leicestershire [6] with Wordsworth, on their supposed way to London. Wordsworths children went from hence with the hooping cough. They knew this & C. knew this. They wrote to C. to say they still had a cough but it was not the hooping one – off goes C – takes poor Hartley with him, & finds on his arrival that it is. I do not know which is the most inexcusable, they for leading Hartley into such danger, or his father for taking him, – for he is the very worst subject in the world for the hooping cough.
I write in great haste not to lose a post. It is needless to say the boxes should come by waggon, – not by coach. Edith does not remember the contents of her boxes well enough to ask for any part of them at present.
God bless you
RS.
Jany 4. 1807.
Many happy returns. – I am gaily at work, & as indefatigable with my hands as you were with your feet.
Notes
* Address: To/ Charles Danvers Esqr/ Bristol./ Single
Stamped:
KESWICK/ 298
Postmark: E/ JAN 7/ 1807
Endorsement: Monday 20 Jany
MS: British Library, Add MS 30928. ALS; 3p.
Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey,
2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 435–36. BACK
[1] The journals of John Wesley (1703–1791; DNB) were first published in twenty parts (London, 1740–1789). BACK
[3] Juniper (dates unknown), a Bristol carpenter who built book cases for Southey and also bound books for him. To ‘Juniperize’ meant to add a gold border and lettering to the bindings of Southey’s books, with a possible allusion to Friar Juniper, disciple of St Francis, who cut the silver bells off a gold border of an altar cloth to give to a poor woman begging alms. BACK
[5] John Perrot (d. 1665; DNB), Battering Rams Against Rome. Or, the Battel of John, the Follower of the Lamb, Fought with the Pope, and His Priests, Whilst He Was a Prisoner in the Inquisition-Prison of Rome (1661). BACK
[6] At Coleorton, the country house being built for Sir George and Lady Beaumont. Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Translated from the Spanish (1807). BACK
