Samuel Rogers and his Contemporaries
Robert Southey to Samuel Rogers, 21 September 1823
‘Keswick: 21 Sept., 1823.
‘Dear Sir,—Having been asked for a letter of
introduction to you, I somewhat hastily promised it, presuming upon your
kindness to excuse a liberty which at this moment I feel that I have no right
to take. Mr. Carne came to me with a
letter from Wordsworth, De Quincey having found him at Professor Wilson’s and taken him to
Rydal. He has travelled in the East, has visited Lady Hester Stanhope, passed ten days in captivity with the
Arabs in the Desert, and seen something of the horrors which are going on in
Greece, and as he likes better to tell his adventures than to set them forth in
a book, his conversation is very interesting. It will remind you perhaps of
poor Kemble by making you ready to
exclaim, “O my a-ches!” but his stories are
not the worse for the want of aspirates, nor his pronunciation the better for
being Ionic, as well as Stafford or Lancashire.
‘Should you be in town during the winter, I hope to have
the pleasure of seeing you and receiving your forgiveness for this intrusion.
Believe me, my dear Sir, yours with sincere respect,
John Carne (1789-1844)
English poet, traveller, and missionary educated at Queens' College, Cambridge; he
published “Letters from the East” in the
New Monthly
Magazine.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
English essayist and man of letters; he wrote for the
London
Magazine and
Blackwood's, and was author of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).
John Philip Kemble (1757-1823)
English actor renowned for his Shakespearean roles; he was manager of Drury Lane
(1783-1802) and Covent Garden (1803-1808).
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope (1776-1839)
Oriental traveler; daughter of Charles Stanhope and niece of William Pitt the younger;
she departed England for Egypt and Palmyra in 1810, settled in Lebanon, and never
returned.
John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854)
Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in
Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
University (1820).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
