“I have to thank you for the honour which you intend me in your forthcoming edition,—a very great honour I cannot but consider it; especially remembering (what I shall never forget) the improvement, as well as the delight, which I derived from your poems more than forty years ago, and have acknowledged in a general preface (just drawn out) to my own. The Conscript Fathers of the Row have set me upon a collected edition of them.
“The booksellers in one respect have rendered me a
service by accelerating what I looked forward to as a posthumous publication;
for I might otherwise have
| Ætat. 63. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 333 |
“The mood in which I have set about this revision is like that a man feels when he is setting his house in order. I waste no time in attempting to mend pieces which are not worth mending; but upon Joan of Arc, which leads the way, as having first brought me into notice, a good deal of patient labour has been bestowed. The faults of language have been weeded out, and as many others as it was possible to extirpate. This would have been a preposterous attempt if the poem had been of a piece before; but it was written in 1793, re-written in 1795, and materially altered in 1797, and what has been done now makes the diction of the same character throughout. Faults enough of every other kind remain to mark it for a juvenile production.
“The men who are now in power are doing the greatest
injury they can to the Church by strengthening the only strong argument that
can be brought up against the alliance between Church and State. They
| 334 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 63. |
“I am a good hoper, even when I look danger full in
the face. We are now in great danger of a severer dearth than any within our
memory. Here in Cumberland, at this time, there is scarcely the slightest
appearance of spring. Last year the hay failed, and the sheep are now dying for
want of food. The gardens have suffered greatly by frosts, which continued till
last week, and most of the grain which was sown in the early spring is lost.
The manufacturers are out of employ, and the cold fit of our commercial disease
is likely to be the most formidable that we have ever experienced. Mischief of
course is at work in the manufacturing countries, and it will be tremendously
aided by the New Poor Laws, which are not more useful in some of their
enactments than they are inhuman in others. I fear, however, nothing so much as
a premature change of ministry. Let the present men remain to reap what they
have sown. You and I cannot live to see the issue of all these
| Ætat. 63. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 335 |
“God bless you, my dear Sir. Present my kind regards to Mrs. Bowles, and believe me,
