The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part 1: 1791-1797 A Romantic Circles Electronic Edition Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 Lynda Pratt Romantic Circles General Editor, Neil Fraistat General Editor, Steven E. Jones General Editor, Carl Stahmer Technical Editor Laura Mandell 2009-03-15 rce163 letterEEd.26.163 Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland College Park, MD March 15, 2009

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MS has not survived. Previously published: Monthly Magazine, 1 (July 1796), 447 [from where the text is taken] under the pseudonym ‘B.’. A new attribution to Southey, it repeats information found in his letter to Grosvenor Charles Bedford [started before and continued on] 23 October [1795] (Letter 137).

These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer

For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.

A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.

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163. Robert Southey to the Editor of the Monthly Magazine, 28 June 1796 MS: MS has not survivedPreviously published: Monthly Magazine, 1 (July 1796), 447 [from where the text is taken] under the pseudonym ‘B.’. A new attribution to Southey, it repeats information found in his letter to Grosvenor Charles Bedford [started before and continued on] 23 October [1795] (Letter 137). SIR,

THE story of the Mysterious Mother is of an earlier date than the noble authorHorace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–1797; DNB), The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (1768), a play dealing with incest. imagined: it may be found in a work of bishop Hall,Joseph Hall (1574–1656; DNB), Bishop of Norwich, religious writer and satirist. entitled Resolutions and Decisions of divers Practical Cases of Conscience, in continual Use amongst Men; of which the second edition, dated 1650, is now lying before me. The bishop says, he had it long ago from the relation of Mr. Perkins,William Perkins (1558–1602; DNB), theologian and Church of England clergyman. and since that, met with it in the report of two several German authors.Joseph Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practicall Cases of Conscience, 2nd edn (London, 1650), pp. 412–415.

FullerThomas Fuller (1607/8–1661; DNB), The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), p. 90., in his Holy State, says of this Perkins, that “he was an excellent chirurgeon at joynting of a broken soul; and would pronounce the word ‘Damn’ with such an emphasis, as left a doleful echo in his auditors’ ears a good while after.” He was lame of the right hand; and Hugh Holland, in his Icones, saith of him:

Dextera quantumvis fuerat tibi manca, docendi Pollebas mirâ dexteritate tamen. Tho’ Nature thee of thy right hand bereft, Right well thou writest with thy hand that’s left. Thomas Fuller, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), p. 92.

The same story is told by Julian de Medrano, of whose Common-place Book an edition was published, 1608, by Cesar Oudin, secretary and interpreter to Henry IV, of France.Julian de Medrano (fl. 1608), La Silva Curiosa, en que se Tratan Diversas Cosas Sotillisimas, y Curiosas, muy Convenientes para Damas y Cavalleros, en Toda Conversacion Virtuousa y Honesta (Paris, 1608). Southey owned a copy of this edition, see A. N. L. Munby (gen. ed.), Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 9 Poets and Men of Letters, ed. Roy Park (London, 1974), pp. 75–288; p. 259. The Spanish writer says, he heard the story in the Bourbonois, where the people showed him the house the parties had lived in, and the place where they were buried, and repeated to him the epitaph:

Cy-gist la fille, cy-gist le père, Cy-gist la soeur, cy-gist le frère; Cy-gist la femme & le mary, Et si n’y a que deux corps icy.The French can be translated as: ‘Here lies the daughter, here lies the father,/ Here lies the sister, here lies the brother;/ Here lies the woman and the husband,/ And yet there are only two bodies here’.

The author of the Mysterious Mother adds, in his preface, that there is a similar story in the Tales of the Queen of Navarre.Margaret of Navarre (1492–1549), The Tales of the Heptameron of Margaret Queen of Navarre (1558). It may be worth remarking, that Julian Medrano was a cavalier of her court, and dedicated his book to that princess; he, of course, would never have taken the story from a book of tales, and given it as a fact that he had learned in his travels.

June 28, 1796.

B.