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.
Bodleian Library, Eng. Lett. c. 24. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 453–454. Translation from Curry.
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.
Where the devil are you, Bedford? Where is your new house at Brixton? Where the devil is my pension?
I am very busy. Today I had a repairer mending the carpet in my study; I had this same repair-man (whose name is Johnny Cockbaine, assuredly the best – Prince-King-Emperor – most worthy mender of all menders. He is worth seeing, and he is worth painting. If you are able to form in your mind an abstract idea of the perfect mender, it will certainly be of this short little Johnny Cockbaine. From head to foot, he is all mender: whatever he does, whatever he thinks is about mending. This little Johnnykins carries as his device a Lion rampant on his buckles. This is a very long parenthesis: now to the matter at hand) I had this same repair-man making new curtains for the study; he had a painter painting the door. I had a bell-hanger hanging a bell. I had a wagon with two packages of books to be reviewed. May the devil take the books. May the devil take the reviewing. I do not like reviewing. I had a fisherman here with a jack [pike] weighing four pounds. The jacks of this lake are very good. I love jack, not roasted but boiled. Boiled jack is better. Roasted is dry. Tell Horace this because Horace loves fish. I had another time a jack of twenty-two pounds. O beautiful Apollo! This was Jackus, this was Johannes. This was Johannes Magnus [1488–1544, the last Catholic bishop in Sweden] as truly as the Archbishop of Uppsala, but certainly that Archbishop would not have been so good boiled.
Where is Peter the Great? Would that this Peter were an Archbishop, then I should dine with an Archbishop. I should very much like to dine with an Archbishop. This whopping Peter wrote me about some books, which was very kind – but did he buy those books? Ask this greatest of all Peters, in the name of the least and the thinnest of all Roberts.
I am quite angry with my printer because he is so very slow. My book [Espriella] is soon to be published.