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.
Keswick Museum and Art Gallery, KESMG 1996.5.191. ALS; 2p. . Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
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.
I take the first opportunity after my return home to thank you for the very interesting & valuable papers with
which you have entrusted me;take use them with that discretion which it is equally my duty
& my desire to observe. Indeed you will readily perceive that in using private materials it would be at once useless &
improper to refer to them as my authorities, – useless because the reader who should be desirous of comparing my statement with
those authorities can have no opportunity of doing it; – improper because it might seem like a wish of transferring to others that
responsibility which ought to rest wholly upon myself. I shall therefore acknowledge in the preface whatever favours of this kind
I have received, but in no instance specify in the body of the work, the specific documents from which it has been drawn, except
where those documents are before the public.
After a long absence, & so hurried & restless a course of life (continually moving from one place to
another) that I had not at any time after I received your packet leisure to acknowledge & thank you for it, as I ought to have
done, I am now just returned to the quiet of my own home.
With many thanks for your obliging & important communication