4305. Robert Southey to Henry Herbert Southey, 24 December 1824
Address: To/ Dr Southey/ 15. Queen Anne Street/ Cavendish Square/ London
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298
Postmark: E/ 27 DE 27/ 1824
Seal: red wax; design illegible
MS: Keswick Museum and Art Gallery, 1996.5.337a. ALS; 4p.
Unpublished.
A letter to the Episcope goes by this post.
I wish you would bring Henry Taylor & John Coleridge together, & I have told J.C. so.
They ought to know each other, on the score of the Q.R, & will do it better thro you than by a dry introduction at Murrays, or one of his crowded dinners. Henry Taylor is at present a writer who has a great deal of power & all good materials in him; & his official situation is such that he is in a fair – I may say a sure way, of becoming a very considerable person. I have a great liking for him, & great hopes of him. – There was an article in the Courier
by him (which I have not seen) in reply to that atrocious & beastly libel in the M Chronicle.
That libel I have referred to Turner, to deal with, or leave alone as he may deem expedient; but if our laws are good for anything, I think he will notice it, in the only way which it ought to be noticed by prosecuting a paper villainous enough to publish it.
My letter has been inserted in Blackwoods Magazine with an introduction in the true Blackwood style, bepraising both Byron & me, talking nonsense about both, & praising the composition of the letter as a masterpiece in its kind.
The remarkable thing in this, is the forwardness with which that Magazine is got ready, & the promptude with which it is carried. My letter was published on the 13th
it could not reach Edinburgh till the 16th, – it is not the last article in the Magazine which is not to be published till New Years day, yet the Magazine is printed, sent to London for Francis Freelings frank, & reaches me by that account on the 23d. The Scotch manage these things better than their neighbours.
The transfer of the QR to John Coleridge is to me a matter of great satisfaction on all accounts. My papers will not be mutilated nor will they be postponed from one number to another, – so that I shall know what I have to depend on.
Love to all – & God bless you
RS.
Dec 24. 1824
A merry Xmas to you all, & many of them
