“Your account of the Monthly Review interested me very much. If they rest the truth of their criticism upon that school poem in plain, direct, tangible language, I will most assuredly favour them with a few lines, first through the medium of as many magazines as we can get access to, and ultimately in a note to the Life. With regard to my own works, I am a perfect Quaker, and fools and rogues may misrepresent and libel them in perfect security; but upon the subject of Henry, the M. Review shall find me a very Tartar.
“Till you informed me of it, I did not know that Lord Byron had amused himself with lampooning me. It is safe game, and he may go on till he is tired. Every apprentice in satire and scandal for the last dozen years has tried his hand upon me. I got hold of the Simpliciad the other day, and wrote as a motto in it these lines, from one of Davenant’s plays which I happened to have just been reading:—
Libels of such weak fancy and composure, That we do all esteem it greater wrong To have our names extant in such paltry rhyme Than in the slanderous sense.’ |
“The manner in which these rhymesters and prosesters misunderstand what they criticise, would be altogether ludicrous, if it did not proceed as often from want of feeling as from want of intellect.
| Ætat. 36. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 279 |
“I want your assistance in a business in which I am
sure it will interest you to give it. A youth of Bristol, by name William Roberts, died of consumption about two
years ago, at the age of nineteen. He was employed in a bank, and his salary,
70l. a year (I believe), was materially useful in
assisting towards the support of his father and mother, and a grandmother, and
one only sister. The family had known better days . . . . . and one calamity
following another, has reduced them very greatly. Yet still there remains that
feeling which, if I call it pride, it is only for want of a better word to
express something noble in its nature. William was a youth
of great genius, and a few days before his death he bequeathed his poems in trust to his two
intimate friends to be published for the benefit of his sister, that being all
he had to bequeath, and his passionate desire (like that of Chatterton) was to provide for her. You must
remember that at that time he did not foresee the subsequent distresses of his
father and mother. These friends were a young physician of the name of
Hogg, settled somewhere near London, and James, a banker of Birmingham, an acquaintance
of mine, the author of that sweet poem upon the Otaheitean Girl, of which some
stanzas were quoted in the third Quarterly Review. James has arranged the poems
and letters of the poor fellow for the press, and will draw up a biographical
memoir. He has consulted me upon the subject, and the plain statement which I
have here made of the circumstances has interested me very deeply . . . . . My
| 280 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 36. |
“My hope is that such a sum may be raised as will be
sufficient to place Eliza Roberts in a situation
respectably to support herself and her parents. I do not yet know what extent
the publication will run to, but as soon as this is settled, I will beg you to
beg subscriptions. . . . . This whole account is written with such a cautious
fear of saying too much, that I fear I have said too little, and may
unwittingly have led you to think slightingly of what poor William Roberts has left behind him. If I have
done this I have done wrong, for certainly he was a youth of great genius and
most uncommon promise, which it is my firm belief, founded upon the purity of
his life and principles and the rectitude of his feelings, that he would amply
have fulfilled, if it had not
| Ætat. 36. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 281 |
“God bless you!
