“Let me trouble you with a commission which, if it be successful, will essentially enrich my store of historical documents. I have just learnt, by accident, that there is in High Holborn a set of Muratori’s great collection of the Italian historians, which, wanting one volume, is on that account offered for sale at a very low price—some five or six pounds, for a collection which I should joyfully purchase at the price of five-and-twenty, were it entire. . . . The three great works which I want are the Acta Sanctorum, the Byzantine Historians, and Muratori; and it would be folly not to purchase this set, notwithstanding it is imperfect, when the loss of one volume so materially diminishes the price, without lessening the utility of the other volumes. I should think it, at half a guinea a volume, a cheap purchase.
“My article
upon the French Revolutionists in the—last Quarterly is a good deal the worse for the
muti-
| Ætat. 38. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 349 |
“I had yesterday the pleasure of cutting open the last
volume of the Register,—a
greater delight to me than it will be to any other person, I dare be sworn.
This is the last and greatest of an author’s pleasures. The London
proprietors urge an alteration in the plan, and want it to be brought out in a
single volume, like the London Annual
Register; the Edinburgh proprietors very wisely negative this
proposal, and determine to carry it on upon the present plan, even if they are
left to themselves. The change, I think, would have been fatal to the work;
whether perseverance may preserve it, is very doubtful. I go to work, however,
upon the year 1811, with great good will. You will find, in the second part of
this new volume, a life of
Lope de Aguirre, written as a
chapter for the history of Brazil, but cut out as an excrescence, for which
room could not be afforded. The narrative is an extraordinary piece of history,
whole and entire of itself, and so little connected with that of any other
country, that it would appear equally as an excrescence in the history of Peru,
or of Venezuela as in that of Brazil; so it is as well where it is as it could
be anywhere else.
| 350 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 38. |
