4019. Robert Southey to [Julius Hare], 13 May 1823
MS: Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. ALS; 1p.
Unpublished.
Dear Sir
The Dialogue between Burke & Ld Grenville would undoubtedly make very many readers judge as unjustly of Landor as he has done of Burke.
The Dialogue between Edmund Burke (1729–1797; DNB) and Lord Grenville was omitted from Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1824), primarily on the grounds of the offence that it would cause over its cynical treatment of Burke’s decision to separate himself from the Whig grouping in 1790–1791 over their approval of the French Revolution.
I am heartily glad it is in our power to withhold it, & have very little doubt that Landor himself, were he to see it in irrevocable types, would wish it had never been written. – The objection is very much to Mr Taylors honour, & very little in the spirit of his trade
The verse to which he objects does not strike me as reprehensible.
In Dialogue VII between Elizabeth I (1533–1603; Queen of England 1558–1603; DNB) and William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–1598; DNB), Imaginary Conversations, 2 vols (London, 1824), I, pp. 83–91 (esp. pp. 87–88), Landor had composed his own version of Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599; DNB), The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), Book 3, canto 6, verses 17–19, which described the goddess Artemis being discovered bathing by the huntsman Actaeon. Taylor had objected to the poem’s prurience, especially the line ‘Too late the goddess hid what hand may hide’.
It proceeds from a picturesque imagination, not a prurient one, & belongs entirely to the subject.
Yrs very truly
Robert Southey.
