“It is nearly a week now since Danvers and I returned from Rownham; and now
the burthen will soon fall off my shoulders, and I shall feel as light as old
Christian when he had passed the
directing post: forty guineas’ worth of reviewing has been hard work. . .
. . The very unexpected and extraordinary alarm brought by yesterday’s
papers may, in some degree, affect my movements, for it has made Tom write to offer his services; and if the
country arm, of course he will be employed. But quid
Diabolus is all this about? Stuart writes well upon the subject, yet I think he overlooks
some circumstances in Bonaparte’s
conduct, which justify some delay in yielding Alexandria and Malta: that report
of Sebastiani’s was almost a
declaration that France would take Egypt
| 202 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Meantime, what becomes of your scheme of travelling? If France goes to war, Spain must do the same, even if the loss of Trinidad did not make them inclined to it. You must not think of the Western Islands or the Canaries; they are prisons from whence it is very difficult to escape, and where you would be cut off from all regular intercourse with England: besides, the Canaries will be hostile ports. In the West Indies you ought not to trust your complexion. When the tower of Siloam fell, it did not give all honest people warning to stand from under. How is the climate of Hungary? Your German would carry you there, and help you there till you learnt a Sclavonic language; and you might take home a profitable account of a country and a people little known. If it should be too cold a winter residence, you might pass the summer there, and reach Constantinople or the better parts of Asia Minor in the winter. This looks like a tempting scheme on paper, and will be more tempting if you look at the map; but, for all such schemes, a companion is almost necessary.
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 203 |
“The Edinburgh Review will not keep its ground. It consists of pamphlets instead of critical accounts. There is the quantity of a three-shilling pamphlet in one article upon the Balance of Power, in which the brimstone-fingered son of oatmeal says that wars now are carried on by the sacrifice of a few useless millions and more useless lives, and by a few sailors fighting harmlessly upon the barren ocean: these are his very words. . . . . He thinks there can be no harm done unless an army were to come and eat up all the sheep’s trotters in Edinburgh. If they buy many books at Gunville*, let them buy the English metrical romancees published by Ritson; it is, indeed, a treasure of true old poetry: the expense of publication is defrayed by Ellis. Ritson is the oddest, but most honest, of all our antiquarians, and he abuses Percy and Pinkerton with less mercy than justice. With somewhat more modesty than Mister Pinkerton, as he calls him, he has mended the spelling of our language, and, without the authority of an act of parliament, changed the name of the very country he lives in into Engleland. The beauty of the common stanza will surprise you.
“Cowper’s Life is the most pick-pocket work, for its shape and price, and author and publisher, that ever appeared. It relates very little of the man himself. This sort of delicacy seems quite groundless towards a man who has left no relations or connections who could be hurt by the most explicit biographical detail. His letters are not what one does expect, and yet what one
* The seat of Mr. Wedgewood. |
| 204 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
. . . . ‘that comical spark, Who wrote to ask me for a Joan of Arc.’ |
