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.
Huntington Library, RS 63. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 362–364.
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.
My silence has been longer than yours, – occasioned by that want of leisure which always is the consequence of loss of time. Fine weather & the wish of showing the country to my friends, & moreover the sad necessity of working the legs to keep the kidney quiet, have been so many motives for morning exercise. business of course accumulated for the evening, & letter writing as the least important has always been the most readily postponed. Duppa is now gone, & George I is gone, our only neighbours whom we care about go tomorrow also – I shall then shut myself up for the winter tho not like the bee to rest, or feed upon my summer gatherings, for alas my summer gatherings supply no winter store.
I have nothing but ill to communicate. that rascally brother has
again left his ship or been turned out of it, & is again sharping about the country. I have made up my mind to the fitness of his
being hung, & am therefore prepared to think any thing short of the gallows will be good luck for him. Of course I pay none of his
alehouse debts, & give him up as utterly irreclaimable. The whole current of politics public & private is set in against me. A
war with Spain will renew all the alarm at Lisbon & prevent me from taking a family there – & even if this blow over; I should
think it more advisable for my Uncle to remove from the neighbourhood of that
accursed yellow fever than for me to approach it. for to Lisbon it will get sooner or later, beyond a doubt. So that about going there
I am quite at a stand. Meantime, as if the very Diabolus ipse
Towards London I suppose we must move, & I shall make one great effort to gather together my books & be gathered to them. thirty miles will not be too far, ten not too near. but thirty better than ten, & it matters not in what direction. Kent or Hertfordshire or Surry the pleasantest counties, & your population calculation would induce a preference of the latter, downy counties favouring longevity, & I having much to do would willingly live as long as possible.
By all means take a wife, if only in abhorrence of Mr Malthus’s Essay, & if you do take one I bespeak a Godfathership for myself, having a liking for these conventional sorts of
relationry which used in old times to mean something. Tis a fit thing in the present state <of the world > to propagate health
& intellect. besides marriage doubles a mans enjoyment. home is not quite home without it, nor a house quite furnished without a
wife.
The book concerning which the Captain enquires is not among my
collection but his question shall be transmitted to Lisbon & I promise him an answer.xx provoke me & at times dispirit me
this work should be so perpetually interrupted by two-penny-half-a-penny jobs, in which the main consideration is – how many pages will
this make.
George I is the better for his journey. We have discovered here a most odd &
perfect resemblance to the profile of George 3 xxxx a party of Gentlemen went up on purpose to christen it Georgris, omitting the main resemblance it
bears to the royal head – in being almost as thick. what is become of George II
?
There are some lines of an old French Poem which I want for a note to Madoc. the poem is entitled Legend (if I mistake
not – de Pierre Faifeu
God bless you. tell me when the days of franking return. we are all well – but the Edithling is so prematurely quick that I am by no means easy about her –