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.
Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Box 17. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 214–217.
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.
Benjamin Constantaffectation barbarizing affectation of Roman titles!) Cambaceres,choice nomination is creditable to the government. – but what of all this? Sieyes
Will you convey the herewith book to Mary Hays. she is a woman
perhaps erroneous in all points of first importance, but a woman of talents, & I believe of a good & warm heart. I like &
esteem her. Lloyd made one of his mushroom intimacies with her – & you know
how it was broken off.
I am very idle – so idle that I have not yet written any poem merely for the sake of telling Stuart at the end of it that I have done, & that he is welcome to the <my> little work I have done since October, to fill up the few
gaps before. it is a comfortable release & my shoulders will be <are> as much lighter as my
purse will be. Howbeit the seventh Thalaba comes on.
Soon I expect Rickman at Bristol, a welcome guest. without any
common taste, few men accord better with me. he is a practical man, & of uncommon talents. I believe he will
shortly quit Xchurch & assume his proper station in society – in which case I lose all
my predilection for Burton – for quite to hermitize is not quite my wish. Shall we never make a
bee hive somewhere?
Six Anthologyshake <see once
more> a very odd & very honest fellow, by the hand, you will in some idling <hour> go make
an old acquaintances heart glad by x xxxxxxx shaking him by the hand.
I have wishd for a letter from you, when the postman rung every day – but you are employed – & letter writing is only fit for idlers. tis an employment I do not over & above esteem, because I am past the age.
To what is the great superiority of Europeans over Orientalists attributable – & the stationariness or even
retrogression of the Orientalists? Persia for instance – it cannot be climate – for in that kingdom there all are all temperatures. religion? but it was the same under Zoroaster as under Mohammedimprovement <advancement> of the species as an establishment is concerned, & the Mufti no worse
than an Archbishop & certainly not so bad as the Pope.
Perhaps Polygamy is the radical evil. the degradation of females in consequence of it is obvious, – & its perpetual excitement is probably the chief cause of the voluptuousness attributed to climate. hence premature debility, hence a brutalized nature. hence habits of domestic despotism, & the inference that what is best in a family, is best in a state.
In Arabia women are not slaves, & the Arabs are mostly monogamous. here then are a people under a burning climate,
unenslaved, by no means remarkable for voluptuousness, & among whom I have never heard of the vice
crime, elsewhere universal in the East. which is probably another off scyon from the same root.
The Deserts are not invincible by man. there are trees & herbs that can grow in the driest sand – the Acacia is
one. these must be his agents – they will create a soil for other vegetables, & vegetation will perhaps attract rains – or supply
gas for its formation. A curse upon the war – the French are now destroying our African settlements
y. 1800.