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, Oxford, MS Eng. Lett. d. 215. Previously published: R. H. Cholmondeley, The Heber Letters, 1783–1832 (London, 1950), p. 238 [in part and misdated 14 Jan 1811].
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.
If you are not provided with a reviewal of Capt Pasleys book upon our Military Policy, will you entrust it to my hands
for your next number, – & I will promise you an article in a right English spirit,x work as Lewis Goldsmiths is calculated, & as I believe designed to
do, by its absurd & palpable falshoods. –
My history of Brazil is very favourably, very kindly, & very well reviewed.coronet is a word appropriate to xxxxxx rank
heraldry & rank, – a savage head-dress of feathers is not a coronet, nor am I do I know any word except coronal by which it can appro properly be called. I use tambour instead of drum, because drum represents to us a
specific musical instrument in daily use, – altogether different from any among the savages. I use napery instead of napkins &
table-cloths because it is a comprehensive word expressing both. Poitrals because exclusively appropriated to horse armour, – a breast-plate belonging to a man. The word Broad in the sense which I have used it, is
in common use in Norfolk, & will I have no doubt be found in the maps of that country: it is that species of lake which is formed
by a great river xxxxxx on its course, – differing from lake & from lagoon. & required for We
must go to provincialisms when we want to designate natural objects with precision, – for upon in such things the dialect of
the metropolis is necessarily deficient. Plumery I allow has no advantage over feathers except that I like it
better in its place. – The cause of my misuse of the word Lutheranism is rightly guessed at – I fell into the obvious error from having
the word Luteranos constantly before my eyes. – Araboutan is not as the reviewer thinks the native name of the country, which was too
extensive & in too wild a state to have a general name, – but of the Brazil-tree.
If I understand my own manner of writing, the style always grows out of the subject. I have no other rule or system
than that of always expressing myself 1. as perspicuously as possible. 2 as impressively as possible. 3 – as concisely as possible.
Excuse me for having intruded upon you with this subject. & receive it as a proof of the attention with which I am at all willing
to listen xx to criticism when it comes in a friendly tone.