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National Library of Scotland, MS 3876. Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849–1850), III, pp. 124–128. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, 2 vols (London, 1891), I, p. 95 [in part].
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.
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I am very much obliged to you for the offer which you make concerning the Edinburgh Review, & fully sensible of
your friendliness & the advantage which it offers <holds out>.the <every> writer
who comes <whom he chuses to summon> before him. The reviewals of Thalaba & Madoc do in no degree influence
me.to <against>
bearing any part in this Journal are these. I have scarcely one opinion in common with it upon any subject. Jeffray is for peace; &
is endeavouring to frighten the people into it. I am for war as long as Bonaparte lives. He is for Catholick emancipation – I believe
that its immediate consequences would be to introduce an Irish Priest into every ship in the navy. My feelings are still less in unison
with him than my opinions. On subjects of moral or political importance no man is more apt to speak in the very gall of bitterness than
I am, & this habit is likely to go with me to the grave; but that sort of severity <bitterness> in which he
indulges, which tends directly & purposely to wound a man in his feelings, & injure him in his fame & fortune (Montgomery is a case in point)own moral xxxxxxxx <feelings> must not be
compromised. To Jeffray as an individual I shall ever be ready to show every
kind of individual courtesy: but of Judge Jeffray
speak & speak as of a bad
politician, a worse moralist, & a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent & unjust.
Your letter was delayed a week upon the road by the snow. I wish it had been written sooner, & had travelled
faster, – or that I had communicated to you my own long-projected edition of Morte Arthur.
The reviewal of Wordsworth I am not likely to see, the
Edinburgh very rarely lying in my way.
Marmionye a
puritanical stickler for correctness, or fastidious about any faults except his own. The best artists both in poetry & painting
have produced the most. Give me more Lays,
The Cid
To recur to the Edinburgh Review, let me once more assure you that, if I do not grievously deceive myself, the
criticisms upon my own poems have not influenced me. For, however unjust they were, they were xxx less so, & far less
uncourteous than what I meet with in other journals; & tho these things injure me materially in a pecuniary point of view, they
make no more impression upon me than the bite of a sucking flea would do upon Garagantua.is criminal who acquits the guilty, – but he is far more so who condemns the innocent. In the Annual I have only
one coadjutor, – all the other writers being below contempt: In the Edinburgh
I should have had many with whom I should have felt it creditable to myself to have been associated, if the irreconcileable difference
which there is between Jeffray & myself upon every great principle of
taste, morality & policy did not occasion an irremovable difficulty. Meantime I am as sincerely obliged to you as if this
difference did not exist, & I could have availed myself of all its advantages, to the importance of which I am fully sensible.
I am very curious for in your life of Dryden that I may see how far your estimation of his merits agrees
with my own.