| 178 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
So passed the close of the year. The commencement of a new one
was saddened by his mother’s last illness. She
had joined them in London, and a few weeks only elapsed before very alarming symptoms
appeared; the best advice availed not, she sank rapidly, and was released on the 5th of
January, 1802, being in the fiftieth year of her age. My father was deeply affected at her
death; for though in childhood he had experienced but little of her care and attention,
having been so early, as it were, adopted by his aunt, he had had the happiness of adding
much to her comfort and support during her later years. “In her whole
illness,” he writes to his brother Henry,
“she displayed a calmness, a suppression of complaint,
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 179 |
The following letter communicates the tidings of her death to his friend Mr. Wynn; and, though presenting a painful picture, is yet one of those which let in so much light upon the character of the writer, that the reader will not wish it to have been withheld.
“You will not be surprised to learn that I have lost my mother. Early on Tuesday morning there came on that difficulty of breathing which betokened death: till then all had been easy; for the most part she had slept, and, when waking, underwent no pain but that wretched sense of utter weakness; but then there was the struggle and sound in the throat, and the deadly appearance of the eyes, that had lost all their tranquillity. She asked for laudanum; I dropt some, but with so unsteady a hand, that I knew not how much; she saw the colour of the water,’ and cried, with a stronger voice than I had heard during her illness, ‘That’s nothing, Robert! thirty drops—six and thirty!’
“It relieved her. She would not suffer me to
* Jan. 6. 1802. |
| 180 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“We had been suffering for twelve hours, and the moment of her release was welcome: like one whose limb has just been amputated, he feels the immediate ceasing of acute suffering;—the pain of the wound soon begins, and the sense of the loss continues through life. I calmed and curbed myself, and forced myself to employment; but, at night, there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my first business to see her. I had used to carry her her food, for I could persuade her better than any one else to the effort of swallowing it.
“Thank God, it is all over! Elmsley called on me and offered me money if I needed it; it was a kindness that I shall remember. Corry had paid me a second quarter, however.
“I have now lost all the friends of my infancy and
childhood. The whole recollections of my first ten years are connected with the
dead. There lives no one who can share them with me. It is losing so much of
one’s existence. I have not been yielding to, or rather indulging, grief;
that would have been
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 181 |
“When I saw her after death, Wynn, the whole appearance was so much that of utter death, that the first feeling was as if there could have been no world for the dead; the feeling was very strong, and it required thought and reasoning to recover my former certainty, that as surely we must live hereafter, as all here is not the creation of folly or of chance.
The next few months passed by without the occurrence of any circumstance worthy of record; his official “duties,” which appear to. have been more nominal than real, being only varied by a short visit to Mr. William Taylor at Norwich. His spirits had not recovered the shock they received from his mother’s death; and it was plain that, however easy and profitable was the appointment he held, it was not sufficiently suited to him to induce him long to retain it, although it afforded him a large share of time for his literary pursuits. Of the present course of these the following letter will give sufficient information:—
| 182 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“I had wondered at your silence, which Corry’s servant made longer than it else
had been, bringing me your letter only yesterday. . . . . The Southey Gazette is happily barren of
intelligence, unless you will hear with interest that I yesterday bought the
Scriptores Rerum
Hispanicarum, after a long search—that the day before, my
boots came home from the cobler’s—that the gold leaf which
Carlisle stuft into my tooth is all
come out—and that I have torn my best pantaloons. So life is passing on,
and the growth of my History satisfies me that it is not passing altogether
unprofitably. One acquaintance drops in to-day, another to-morrow; the friends
whom I have here look in often, and I have rather too much society than too
little. Yet, I am not quite the comfortable man I should wish to be; the
lamentable rambling to which I am doomed, for God knows how long, prevents my
striking root any where,—and we are the better as well as the happier for
local attachment. Now do I look round, and can fix upon no spot which I like
better than another, except for its mere natural advantages. ’Tis a
res damnabilis, Bedford, to have no family ties that one cares
about. And so much for the Azure Fiends, whom I shall now take the liberty of
turning out of the room. I am busy
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 183 |
“. . . . . I wish I were at Bath with you; ’twould
do me good all over to have one walk over Combe Down. I have often walked
there, before we were both upon the world. . . . . Oh! that I could catch Old
Time, and give him warm water, and antimonial powder, and ipecacuanha, till he
brought up again the last nine years! Not that I want them all; but I do wish
there was a house at Bath wherein I had a home-feeling, and that it were
possible ever again to feel as I have felt returning from school along the
Bristol road, Eheu fugaces, Posthume,
Posthume! The years may go; but I wish so many good things
did not go with them, the pleasures, and the feelings, and the ties of youth.
Blessings on the Moors, and the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, and the saints!
I yet feel an active and lively interest in my pursuits. I have made some
progress in what promises to be a good chapter about the Moorish period; and I
have finished the first six reigns, and am now more than half way through a
noble black letter chronicle of Alonso the
XIth, to collate with the seventh. The Life of the
Cid will be a fit frame for a picture of the manners of his
time, and a curious picture it will be: putting all
| 184 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Ride, Grosvenor, and walk, and bathe, and drink water, and drink wine, and eat, and get well, and grow into good spirits, and write me a letter.
In this letter my father speaks of passing his holydays in Bristol. A very short time, however, only elapsed before he emancipated himself altogether from the trammels of his official duties. Mr. Corry, it seems, having little or no employment for him as secretary, wished him to undertake the tuition of his son; but as this was neither “in the bond,” nor at all suited to my father’s habits and inclinations, he resigned his appointment, losing thereby, to use his own words, “a foolish office and a good salary.” I may add, however, that this circumstance only somewhat hastened his resignation, for a situation which was “all pay and no work” was by no means suited either to his taste or his conscience.
He now took up his abode once more in Bristol “Here,” he
writes to Mr. Coleridge, “I have meantime a
comfortable home, and books enough to employ as much time as I can find for them; my table
is covered with folios, and my History advances steadily, and to my own mind well. No other
employment pleases me half so much; nevertheless, to other employment I am compelled by the
most cogent of all reasons. I have a job in hand for Longman and Rees, which will bring me
in 60l., a possibility of 40l., and a chance
of a farther 30l.;
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 185 |
But the various works here alluded to, are not the only ones upon which my father had been lately engaged. A native of Bristol himself, he had always taken a strong interest in Chatterton’s writings and history,—
. . . . “The marvellous boy, That sleepless soul that perished in his pride:”† |
Some time previously. Sir Herbert Croft had obtained possession from Mrs. Newton of all her brother’s letters and MSS. under promise of speedily returning them; instead of which, some months afterwards, he incorporated and published them in a pamphlet entitled “Love and Madness.” At the use
* July 25. 1802. † Wordsworth. |
| 186 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
It was now arranged that a new edition of Chatterton’s works should be jointly edited by Mr Cottle and my father; the former undertaking the consideration of the authenticity of Rowley, the latter the general arrangement of the work. It was published, in three vols, octavo, at the latter end of the present year (1802); and the editors had the satisfaction of paying over to Mrs. Newton and her daughter upwards of 300l., a sum which was the means of rescuing them from great poverty in their latter days.
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 187 |
“Grosvenor, I do not like the accounts which reach me of your health. Elmsley says you look ill; your friend Smith tells me the same tale; and I know you are not going the way to amendment. Instead of that office and regular business, you ought to be in the country, with no other business than to amuse yourself: a longer stay at Bath would have benefited you; if the waters were really of use to you, you ought to give them a longer trial. . . . . As for ‘It can’t be,’ and ‘I must be at the office,’ and such-like phrases, when a man is seriously ill they mean nothing.*
“Tom is with me, and has been here about a fortnight, and kept me in as wholesome a state of idleness as I wish you to enjoy.
“Since the last semi-letter I wrote, my state affairs have been settled, and my unsecretaryfication completed,—a good sinecure gone; but, instead of thinking the loss unlucky, I only think how lucky it was I ever had it. A light heart and a thin pair of breeches,—you know the song; and it applies, for, breeches being the generic name, pantaloons are included in all their modifications, and I sit at the
* “Have you time to die, sir?” was the home question of a London physician to a patient, a lawyer in full practice, who was making similar excuses for not taking his prescription of rest and freedom from anxious thought; and it admitted but of one reply. |
| 188 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“So many virtues were discovered in me when I was Mr. Secretary, that I suppose nothing short of sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion, will be found possible reasons for my loss of office. The old devil will be said to have entered, having taken with him seven other evil spirits, and the last state of that man (meaning me) will be worse than the first.
“But I hope I am coming to live near London: not in its filth; if John May can find me a good snug house about Richmond, there I will go, and write my History, and work away merrily; and I will drink wine when I can afford it, and when I cannot, strong beer shall be the nectar—nothing like stingo! and if that were to fail too, laudanum is cheap; the Turks have found that out; and while there are poppies, no man need go to bed sober for want of his most gracious Majesty’s picture. And there will be a spare bed at my Domus,—mark you that, Grosvenor Bedford! and Tom’s cot into the bargain; and, from June till October, always a cold pie in the cupboard; and I have already got a kitten and a dog in remainder,—but that is a contingency; and you know there is the contingency of another house-animal, whom I already feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those he loves best.
“Eblis’s angels sometimes go up to peep at the
table of fate, and then get knocked on the head with stars, as we see; only
foolish people such as we are mistake them for shooting stars. I should like
one
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 189 |
“In reply to your letter there are so many things to be
said that I know not where to begin. First and foremost, then, about Keswick,
and the pros and cons for domesticating there. To live cheap,—to save the
crushing expense of furnishing a house;—sound, good, mercantile motives!
Then come the ghosts of old Skiddaw and Great Robinson;—the whole
eye-wantonness of lakes and mountains,—and a host of other feelings,
which eight years have modified and moulded, but which have rooted like oaks,
the stronger for their shaking. But then your horrid latitude! and incessant
rains! . . . . and I myself one of your greenhouse plants, pining for want of
sun. For Edith, her mind’s eyes
are
| 190 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 191 |
“We shall probably agree altogether some day upon Wordsworth’s Lyrical Poems. Does he not associate more feeling with particular phrases, and you also with him, than those phrases can convey to any one else? This I suspect. Who would part with a ring of a dead friend’s hair? and yet a jeweller will give for it only the value of the gold: and so must words pass for their current value.
“. . . . . I saw a number of notorious people after you left London. Mrs. Inchbald,—an odd woman, but I like her. Campbell . . . . who spoke of old Scotch ballads with contempt! Fuseli . . . . Flaxman, whose touch is better than his feeling, Bowles . . . . Walter Whiter, who wanted to convert me to believe in Rowley. Perkins, the Tractorist*, a demure-looking rogue. Dr. Busby,—oh! what a Dr. Busby!—the great musician! the greater than Handel! who is to be the husband of St. Cecilia in his seraph state, . . . . and he set at me with a dead compliment! Lastly, Barry, the painter: poor fellow! he is too mad and too miserable to laugh at.
“. . . . . Heber sent certain volumes of Thomas Aquinas to your London lodgings, where peradventure they
* This alludes to Perkins’s magnetic Tractors. |
| 192 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
The following month, September, was marked by the birth of his first child,
a daughter, named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret; and, ardently
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 193 |
My father was now becoming weary of being a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and having now a nursery as well as a library to remove, a permanent residence was becoming almost a matter of necessity. His thoughts, as we have seen, had at one time turned towards settling at Richmond, and latterly more strongly towards Cumberland: but for a while he gave up this scheme, attracted by the greater conveniences of Wales; and he now entered into treaty for a house in Glamorganshire, in the Vale of Neath, “one of the loveliest spots,” he thought it, in Great Britain. “There,” he says, “I mean to remain and work steadily at my History till it be necessary for me to go to Portugal, to correct what I shall have done, and hunt out new materials. This will be two years hence; and if the place answer my wishes, I shall not forsake it then, but return there as to a permanent residence. One of the motives for fixing there is the facility afforded of acquiring the Welsh language.”*
“I thought you would know from Wynn that I trespass on my eyes only for short letters; or from
* To William Taylor, Esq., Nov. 21. 1802. |
| 194 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“As a different specimen, I wish you could see a life of
St. Francisco, a section upon
Mohammedanism, and a chapter upon the Moorish period. Oh, these eyes! these
eyes! to have my brain in labour,
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 195 |
“. . . . . Snakes have been pets in England; is it not Cowley who has a poem upon one?—
‘Take heed, fair Eve,
you do not make Another tempter of the snake.’ |
| 196 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Vidi the
Review of Edinburgh. The first part is
designed evidently as an answer to Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads; and, however
relevant to me, quoad Robert Southey, is certainly utterly irrelevant to Thalaba. In their account of
the story they make some blunders of negligence: they ask how Thalaba knew that he was to be the Destroyer,
forgetting that the Spirit told him so in the text; they say that the
inscription of the locust’s forehead teaches him to read the ring, which
is not the case; and that Mohareb tries to
kill him at last, though his own life would be destroyed at the same
time,—without noticing that that very ‘though’ enters into
the passage, and the reason why is given. I added all the notes for the cause
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 197 |
“The general question concerning my system and taste is
one point at issue; the metre, another. These gentlemen who say that the metre
of the Greek choruses is difficult to understand at a first reading, have,
perhaps, made it out at last, else I should plead the choruses as precedent,
and the odes of Stolberg in German, and
the Ossian of Cesarotti in Italian; but this has been done
in the M. Magazine’s review of
Thalaba. For the
question of taste, I shall enter into it when I preface Madoc. I believe we are both classics in our
taste; but mine is of the Greek, theirs of the Latin school. I am for the
plainness of Hesiod and Homer, they for the richness and ornaments of
Virgil. They want periwigs placed upon
bald ideas, a narrative poem must have its connecting parts; it cannot be all
interest and incident, no more than a picture all light, a tragedy all pathos.
. . . . The review altogether is a good one, and will be better than any London
one, because London reviewers always know something of the authors who appear
before them, and this inevitably affects the judgment. I, myself, get the
worthless poems of some good-natured person whom I know; I am aware of what
review-
| 198 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“But when any Scotchman’s book shall come to be reviewed, then see what the Edinburgh critics will say. . . . . Their philosophy appears in their belief in Hindoo chronology! and when they abuse Parr’s style, it is rather a knock at the dead lion, old Johnson. A first number has great advantages; the reviewers say their say upon all subjects, and lay down the law: that contains the Institutes; by and by they can only comment.
In the meantime my father’s pleasant anticipations of living in Wales were suddenly all frustrated; for, just as the treaty was on the point of being concluded, it occurred to him that some small additions were wanting in the kitchen department, and this request the landlord so stoutly resisted, that the negotiation was altogether broken off in consequence.
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 199 |
Upon this slight occurrence, he used to say, hinged many of the outward circumstances of his future life; and, much and deeply as he afterwards became attached to the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, he would often speak with something like regret of Maes Gwyn and the Vale of Neath.
Meanwhile his literary labours were proceeding much in their usual course, notwithstanding the complaint in his eyes. “I am reviewing for Longman,” he says at this time; “reviewing for Hamilton; translating, perhaps about again to versify for the Morning Post: drudge—drudge—drudge. Do you know Quarles’s emblem of the soul that tries to fly, but is chained by the leg to earth? For myself I could do easily, but not easily for others, and there are more claims than one upon me.”*
From some cause or other, his correspondence seems somewhat to have diminished at this time; the few letters, however, that I am able to select relating to this period are not devoid of interest.
“. . . . . I am rich in books, considered as plain and poor Robert Southey, and in foreign books considered as
* To William Taylor, Esq., January 23. 1803. |
| 200 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Of the Beguines I have, as yet, found neither traces nor tidings, except that I have seen the name certainly among the heretic list; but my monastic knowledge is very far from complete. I know only the outline for the two centuries between Francisco and Luther, and nothing but Jesuit history from that period.
“Do not suspect me of querulousness; labour is my
amusement, and nothing makes me growl, but that the kind of labour cannot be
wholly my own choice;—that I must lay aside old chronicles, and review
modern poems; instead of composing from a full head, that I must write like a
school-boy upon some idle theme. on which nothing can be said or ought to be
said. I believe the best thing will be as you hope, for, if I live and do well,
my History shall be done, and that will be a fortune to a man
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 201 |
“Coleridge is with me at present; he talks of going abroad, for, poor fellow, he suffers terribly from this climate. You bid me come with the swallows to London! I wish I could go with the swallows in their winterly migration. . . . .
“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.’ |
“I have been thinking of Brixton, Grosvenor, for these many days past, when more
painful thoughts would give me leave. An old lady, whom I loved greatly, and
have for the last eight years regarded with something like a filial veneration,
has been carried off by this influenza. She was mother to Danvers, with whom I have so long been on
terms of the closest intimacy. . . . . Your ejection from Brixton has very long
been in my head as one of the evil things to happen in 1803, though it was not
predicted in Moore’s Almanack.
However, I am glad to hear you have got a house, . . . . and still more, that
it is an old house.
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 205 |
“Your letter was unusually interesting, and dwells upon
my mind. I could, and perhaps will some day, write an eclogue upon leaving an
old place of residence. What you say of yourself impresses upon me still more
deeply the conviction, that the want of a favourite pursuit is your greatest
source of discomfort and discontent. It is the pleasure of pursuit that makes every man happy; whether the merchant, or the
sportsman, or the collector, the philobibl, or the reader-o-bibl, and maker-o-bibl, like
me,—pursuit at once supplies employment and hope. This is what I have
often preached to you, but perhaps I never told
| 206 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“So much for the practical effects of Epictetus, to whom I hold myself indebted for much amendment of character. Now,—when I am not comparatively, but positively, a happy man, wishing little, and wanting nothing,—my delight is the certainty that, while I have health and eyesight, I can never want a pursuit to interest. Subject after subject is chalked out. In hand I have Kehama, Madoc, and a voluminous history; and I have planned more poems and more histories; so that whenever I am removed to another state of existence, there will be some valde lacrymabile hiatus in some of my posthumous works.
“We have all been ill with La Gripe. But the
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 207 |
“Huzza! huzza! huzza! The bottle is a good post, and the Atlantic delivers letters according to direction.
| 208 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Yours of May 23. 1802 Lat 33 . 46 N. Lon. 64 . 27 W. was found by Messrs. Calmer and Seymour, of St Salvador’s, Dec 18, 1802, on the N.W. of that island, Lat. 23 . 30 N. Lon. 73 . 30 W. very civilly enclosed by some Mr. Aley Pratt, Feb, 10., sent per Betsey Cains, Capt. Wilmott, and has this day reached me from Ramsgate, to my very great surprise and satisfaction. You had sealed it so clumsily, that some of the writing was torn, and the salt water had got at it, so that the letter is in a ruinous state; but it shall be preserved as the greatest curiosity in my collection. I shall send the account to Stuart.
“I did heartily regret that you were not here; we would have drawn a cork in honour of Messrs. Calmer and Seymour, and Aley Pratt, who, by keeping the letter two months, really seem to have been sensible that the letter was of value. When I consider the quadrillion of chances against such a circumstance, it seems like a dream,—the middle of the Atlantic, thrown in there! cast on a corner of St. Salvador’s, and now here, at No. 12, St. James’s Place, Kingsdown, Bristol; hunting me through the ocean to the Bahamas, and then to this very individual spot. Oh, that the bottle had kept a log-book! If the Bottle-conjurer had been in it, now!
“I think this letter decisive of a current; chance
winds would never have carried it 600 miles in less than seven months: and, if
I recollect right, by theory there ought to be a current in that direction.
Supposing the bottle to have been found the very day it
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 209 |
“Why, Tom! you
must be mad, stark staring mad, jumping mad, horn mad, to be lying in port all
this time! For plain or stark madness I should prescribe a simple
strait-waistcoat;—staring madness maybe alleviated by the use of green
spectacles;—for jumping madness I have found a remedy in a custom used by
the Siamese: when they take prisoners, they burn their feet to prevent them
from running away;—horn madness is, indeed, beyond my skill: for that
Doctor’s Commons is the place. I am vexed and provoked for you to see
prizes brought in under your nose. . . . . My books have had an increase since
you left. I have
| 210 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“I have been very hard at history, and have almost finished, since your departure, that thick folio chronicle which you may remember I was about skindeep in, and which has supplied me with matter for half a volume. This war terrifies and puzzles me about Portugal. I think of going over alone this next winter, while I can. I have fifteen quartos on the way from Lisbon; and, zounds! if they should be taken! . . . . Next month I shall go to London. The hard exercise of walking the streets will do me good. My picture in the Exhibition* pleases everybody, I hear; I wish you had seen it.
“. . . . . Remember my advice about all Dutch captains in
* This picture was by Opie, and is the one engraved in this work. |
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 211 |
“I have just gone through the Scottish Border Ballads. Walter Scott himself is a man of great talent and genius; but wherever he patches an old poem, it is always with new bricks. Of the modern ballads, his own fragment is the only good one, and that is very good. I am sorry to see Leyden’s good for so little. Sir Agrethorn is flat, foolish, Matthewish, Gregoryish, Lewisish. I have been obliged to coin vituperative adjectives on purpose, the language not having terms enough of adequate abuse. I suppose the word Flodden-Field entitles it to a place here, but the scene might as well have been laid in El-dorado, or Tothill Fields, or the country of Prester John, for anything like costume which it possesses. It is odd enough that almost every passage which Scott has quoted from Froissart should be among the extracts which I had made.
“In all these modern ballads there is a modernism
| 212 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Scott, it seems, adopts the same system of metre with me, and varies his tune in the same stanza from iambic to anapæstic ad libitum. In spite of all the trouble that has been taken to torture Chaucer into heroic metre, I have no doubt whatever that he wrote upon this system, common to all the ballad writers. Coleridge agrees with me upon this. The proof is, that, read him thus, and he becomes everywhere harmonious; but expletive syllables, en’s and y’s and e’s, only make him halt upon ten lame toes. I am now daily drinking at that pure well of English undefiled, to get historical manners, and to learn English and poetry.
“His volume of the Border Songs is more amusing for its
prefaces and notes than its poetry: the ballads themselves were written in a
very unfavourable age and country; the costume less picturesque than chi-
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 213 |
“. . . . . Rickman tells me there will be no army sent to Portugal; that it is understood the French may overrun it at pleasure, and that then we lay open Brazil and Spanish America. If, indeed, the Prince of Brazil could be persuaded to go over there, and fix the seat of his government in a colony fifty times as large, and five hundred fold more valuable, than the mother country, England would have a trade opened to it far more than equivalent to the loss of the Portuguese and Spanish ports. But if he remains under the protection of France, and is compelled to take a part against England, any expedition to Brazil must be for mere plunder. Conquest is quite impossible.
“Most likely I shall go up to town in about a week or ten days. God bless you!
| 214 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Why, Grosvenor, that is an idle squeamishness of yours, that asking a previous leave to speak. Where my conscience becomes second to your challenge, the offence shall be amended; where we differ, mine is the voice potential. But, in truth, I will tell you that I am out of humour with Kehama, for half a hundred reasons: historical composition is a source of greater, and quieter, and more continuous pleasure; and that poem sometimes comes into my head with a—shall I sit down to it? and this is so easily turned out again, that the want of inclination would make me half suspect a growing want of power, if some rhymes and poemets did not now and then come out and convince me to the contrary. . . . . Abuse away ad libitum.
“If Cumberland
must have a Greek name, there is but one that fits him—Aristophanes—and that for the worst part of
his character. If his plays had any honest principle in them, instead of that
eternal substitution of honour for honesty, of a shadow for a
substance—if his novels were not more profligate in their tendency than
Matthew Lewis’s unhappy book—if the perusal of his
Calvary were not a
cross heavy enough for any man to bear who has ever read ten lines of Milton—if the man were innocent of all
these things, he ought never to be forgiven for his
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 215 |
“. . . . . The Grenvilles are in
the right, but they got right by sticking in the wrong: they turned their faces
westward in the morning, and swore the sun was there; and they have stood still
and sworn on, till, sure enough, there the sun is. But they stand upon the
strong ground now, and have the argument all hollow; yet what is to come of it,
and what do they want—their country asks that question. War? They have
it; every man in the country says Amen, and they whose politics are most
democratic say Amen most loudly and most sincerely. In spite of their speeches,
I cannot wish them in; and, when change of ministry is talked of, cannot but
feel with Fox, that, little as I may like
them, ten to one I shall like their successors worse, and sure I am that worse
war ministers than the last cannot curse
this country. . . . . These men behaved so well upon Despard’s business, and have shown such
a respect to the liberties and feelings of this country, that they have fully
won my good will. I believe they will make a sad piecemeal patchwork
administration. . . . . It does seem that, by some fatality, the best talents
of the
| 216 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“I am promised access to the King’s library, by Heber; and, indeed, it is a matter of considerable consequence that I should obtain it. Morning, noon, and night, I do nothing but read chronicles, and collect from them; and I have travelled at a great rate since the burthen of translating and reviewing has been got rid of: but this will not last long; I must think by and by of some other job-work, and turn to labour again, that I may earn another holyday.
“I call Margaret, by way of avoiding all commonplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child and a most excellent character. She loves me better than any one except her mother; her eyes are as quick as thought, she is all life and spirit, and as happy as the day is long: but that little brain of hers is never at rest, and it is painful to see how dreams disturb her. A Dios!
Soon after the date of the letter, my father paid a short visit to London,
the chief purpose of which was to negotiate with Messrs. Longman and Rees respecting the
management of a Bibliotheca Britannica upon a very extensive scale, to be arranged
chronologically, and made a readable book by biography, criticism, and connecting chapters,
to be published like the Cyclopædia in parts, each volume
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 217 |
Upon concluding his agreement with Messrs. Longman and Rees, he seems to have communicated at once with Mr. Coleridge, whose letter in reply the reader will not be displeased to have laid before him, containing, as it does, the magnificent plan of a work almost too vast to have been conceived by any other person. Alas! that the plans of such a mind should have been but splendid dreams.
“. . . . . I write now to propose a scheme, or rather a rude outline of a scheme, of your grand work. What harm can a proposal do? If it be no pain to you to reject it, it will be none to me to have it rejected. I would have the work entitled Bibliotheca Britannica,
Afterwards Sir Anthony Carlisle. |
| 218 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Let the next volume contain the history of English poetry and poets, in which I would include all
prose truly poetical. The first half of the second volume should be dedicated
to great single names, Chaucer and
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and
Taylor, Dryden and Pope; the
poetry of witty logic,—Swift,
Fielding, Richardson, Sterne: I write par
hazard, but I mean to say all great names as have either
formed epochs in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the
great object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and
demerits of the books; secondly, what of these belong to
the age—what to the author quasi
peculium. The second half of the second volume should be a
history of poetry and romances, everywhere interspersed with biography, but
more flowing, more consecutive, more bibliographical, chronological, and
complete. The third volume I would have
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 219 |
“These three volumes would be so generally interesting,
so exceedingly entertaining, that you might bid fair for a sale of the work at
large. Then let the fourth volume take up the history of metaphysics, theology,
medicine, alchemy, common, canon, and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry VII.; in
other words, a history of the dark ages in Great Britain. The fifth
volume—carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first
half; the second half, comprise the theology of all the reformers. In the
fourth volume there would be a grand article on the philosophy of the theology
of the Roman Catholic religion. In this (fifth volume), under different
names,—Hooker, Baxter, Biddle, and Fox,—the spirit of the theology of all the other parts of
Christianity. The sixth and seventh volumes must comprise all the articles you
can get, on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in
books since the Reformation; and, by this time, the book, if it answered at
all, would have gained so high a reputation, that you need not fear having whom
you liked to write the different articles —medicine, surgery, chemistry,
&c. &c., navigation, travellers, voyagers, &c. &c. If I go into
Scotland, shall I engage Walter Scott to
write the history of Scottish poets? Tell me, however, what you think of the
plan. It would have one prodigious advantage: whatever accident stopped the
work, would only prevent the future good, not
| 220 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“I meant to have written sooner; but those little units
of interruption and preventions, which sum up to as ugly an aggregate as the
items in a lawyer’s bill, have come in the way. . . . .
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 221 |
“For my own comfort, and credit, and peace of mind, I must have a plan which I know myself strong enough to execute. I can take author by author as they come in their series, and give his life and an account of his works quite as well as ever it has yet been done. I can write connecting paragraphs and chapters shortly and pertinently, in my way; and in this way the labour of all my associates can be more easily arranged. . . . . And, after all, this is really nearer the actual design of what I purport by a bibliotheca than yours would be,—a book of reference, a work in which it may be seen what has been written upon every subject in the British language: this has elsewhere been done in the dictionary form; whatever we get better than that form—ponemus lucro.
“The Welsh part, however, should be kept com-
| 222 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“The first part, then, to be published is the Saxon; this Turner will execute, and to this you and William Taylor may probably both be able to add something from your stores of northern knowledge. The Saxon books all come in sequence chronologically; then the mode of arrangement should be by centuries, and the writers classed as poets, historians, &c., by centuries, or by reigns, which is better. . . . . Upon this plan the Schoolmen will come in the first volume.
“The historical part of the theology, and the
bibliographical, I shall probably execute myself, and you will do the
philosophy. By the by, I have lately found the book of John Perrott the Quaker, who went to convert
the Pope, containing all his epistles to the Romans, &c., written in the
Inquisition at Rome; for they allowed him the privilege of writing, most likely
because his stark madness amused them. This fellow (who turned rogue at last,
wore a sword, and persecuted the Quakers in America to make them swear) made a
schism in the society against
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 223 |
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