“Thank you for your second volume*, which, if I had not been more than usually prest for time, I should have read throughout at a sitting immediately on its arrival; but of which I have read enough to know that it is very good. Indeed, I do not see how that part which I have read could have been better.
“If your lumbago be severe, I can tell you that at Yarmouth cod-liver oil taken internally used to be considered as a specific for that complaint; but in what quantity taken I cannot tell. It is a villainous complaint, as I know by some slight touches of it only; but complaints that threaten no serious consequences sit lightly on us even when they are heaviest. The flesh feels them, but not the spirit; and there it is we feel when those who are near and
* Of The Lives of British Painters, &c. in Murray’s Family Library. |
| Ætat. 56. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 89 |
“I am put to the daily expense of two hours’ walking to keep in order a liver which has a great inclination—as if the spirit of Reform had reached it—to try some new mode of action altogether inconsistent with the safety of the constitution. The remedy seems to answer well; and when the weather will allow me to take a book in my hand, it is not altogether lost time. I can read small print at the pace of three miles an hour; and when I have read enough to chew the cud upon, then in goes the pocket volume, and I add a mile an hour to my speed.
“Galignani has
sent me his edition of all my poems, with his compliments. He has put Lawrence’s name to the portrait, which
is a worsened copy of ‘Fitzbust the Evangelical.’ He has got a most
circumstantial memoir, in which every circumstance that is not totally false is
more or less inaccurate; all Hazlitt’s abuse of me is interwoven and mixed up with a
hodge-podge of panegyric, which in its particulars is just as false. Some
rubbish which I had thrown overboard is raked up; one poem given to me which is
Crowe’s, another which is
Cottle’s, and a third which is
I forget by whom. And one or two pieces are printed twice over. Withal it is a
goodly volume; and will make my poems known on the Continent to the cost of
their sale at home. I shall favour M. Galignani with a few
lines, to be inserted in my epistle to you, when-
| 90 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 56. |
