626. Robert Southey to Mary Barker, [mid-late November 1801]
*
Charlotte Smith [1] I see is better acquainted with John
Bunyan [2] than with Robert Southey. that she
will find out whenever we meet. [3] as for panegyric, I never
praised living being yet except Mary
Wollstonecraft
[4] – not even Bonaparte [5] in his honest days. she I perceive
still clings to France – but France has played the traitor
with Liberty. – Mary
Barker – it is not I who have turned round. I
stand where I stood looking at the rising sun – & now
the sun has set behind me! –
England has mended – is mending – will mend.
I have still faith enough in God & hope enough of man.
but not of France! Freedom cannot grow up in that hot bed of
immorality. that oak must root in a hardier soil – England
or Germany. a military despotism! – popery reestablished –
the negroes again to be enslaved! [6] – Why had not the man
perished before the Walls of Acre [7] in his
greatness & his glory! – I was
asked to write a poem upon that defeat, & half tempted
to do it because it went to my very heart –
I wish we could offer you a bed – lodgings
cramp one sadly. Ediths love. – we are eager to see you –
yrs
R Southey.
Notes
* Address:
To/ Miss Barker.
MS: MS untraced; text is taken from
Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jnr, ‘The Letters of Robert
Southey to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (unpublished
PhD, Harvard, 1967), pp. 20-21 [where it is dated
December 1801]
Previously published: John Wood
Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of
Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I,
pp. 180–181.
Dating note: Miss Barker had visited
Southey in London and left by 3 December 1801 (Southey
to Danvers 2-3 December 1801, Letter 634). This letter
was written in reply to a letter of Mary Barker’s and in
expectation of her visit. A date of mid-late November
1801 can therefore be suggested for this
letter. BACK
[1] Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806;
DNB), poet and novelist; author,
among many other works, of Celestina
(1791) and The Old Manor House
(1793). BACK
[2] John
Bunyan (1628-1688; DNB), author of
Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678-1684). BACK
[3] Mary Barker was an old friend of
Charlotte Smith; they spent the winter together in
London in 1801-1802. BACK
[4] Southey’s ‘To Mary Wollstonecraft’ first
appeared in Poems (Bristol, 1797), p.
3. BACK
[5] Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821, First
Consul 1799-1804, Emperor of the French
1804-1814). BACK
[6] Southey mentions Napoleon’s assumption of
control in France by a military coup on 9 November 1799,
the signature of a Concordat between France and the
Papacy in July 1801, and preparations for an expedition,
which sailed on 14 December 1801, to re-conquer the
French colony of Haiti. BACK
[7] Napoleon’s plan to advance from Egypt
into Palestine was halted by his failure to take the
city of Acre in a siege of March-May 1799. BACK
