Dear Wynn
I am thinking – or rather trying to think about a song for you.
& if I can make a good one you shall have it. but motions of the brain are
not like motions of the bowels tho Dryden by his remedy of stewed prunes seemed
to think them xxxxx so. [1]
My reviewing work lies before me – like a holydays task an ugly
job left till the very last. Owen Cambridge [2] whom you so much admire is among
the prisoners – & a great volume of the History of Maritime discovery by
Stanier Clarke, [3] which said Clarke I am
breaking upon the wheel for the crimes of pedantry, stupidity, jack-assness
& pick-pocketry. Madoc [4] goes on & if my
poor eyes allow you shall have a good spell of books for a Xmas dish. But still
history [5] suits me best. do you know that the Portugueze got at
Tombuctoo? [6] now as they did get
there & yet say nothing particular about it, it is a very fair corollary
that Tombuctoo is not very much better than the other collections of negro-sties
which are called cities in Africa. the state of society in Negroland puzzles me.
we read of cities & courts & palaces & Kings, & Kings they are
to all intents & purposes. yet when we think of one of these King Toms with
a captains old coat, a pair of Monmouth Street [7] red breeches – a tye wig, playing with
his brass buttons, or with a rattle one wonders how the Devil they came by the
forms of a regular government. they look to me like a degraded race. as if they
had been civilized once & had sunk into the dotage – the second childhood of
society.
Your wine is ordered as I gave no directions for the payment the
merchant has drawn upon the gentleman to whom it is consigned. I have had a
grievous loss. a whole cargo of books for which I had been waiting & my Uncle searching two years –
taken in the King George Packet. [8] Among them was
the oldest Poem about the Cid, [9] & the oldest Gothic codes. [10] Surely in time of war
our Packets ought to be armed vessels or frigates. We give our mail coach a
guard & yet leave our foreign mails to the mercy of every French
privateer.
My eyes are very bad again. this is a sore evil & I fear it
will cling to me. in other respects I am well & should be sufficiently happy
were it not for the stinging recollection how much happier I have been. in
company I am not less alive & chearful than ever, but when alone I feel
myself sadly different from what I was – as if the roots which attach me to
earth were all loosened. my head does not teem with plans & hopes as it used
to do. I go to Madoc & my history with a feeling that when I have finished
them my work will be done. this feeling makes me regard them with deeper
interest & proceed more perseveringly least they should not be finished.
God bless you.
R S.
Keswick.
Friday.
Notes* Address: [deletions and
readdress in another hand] To/ C W Williams Wynn Esqr.
M.P./ Wynnstay/ Wrexham Holywell/
Flintshire
Stamped: KESWICK / 298; WREXHAM/ 202
MS: National Library
of Wales, MS 4811D
Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.),
Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols
(London, 1856), I, pp. 238-239 [where it is dated 28 September
1803].
Dating note: Dated from internal evidence noting the loss of
Southey’s books. Friday was 30 September in 1803. BACK [1] John Dryden (1631-1700; DNB), whose
recommendation of prunes to make writing easier was well-known and
much-ridiculed; see Walter Scott, The Life of John Dryden (Edinburgh and London, 1834), p.
389. BACK [2] George Owen Cambridge (1756-1841), The Works of
Richard Owen Cambridge (1803), Annual Review for
1803, 2 (1804), 583-585. BACK [3] James Stanier Clarke
(1766-1834; DNB), The Progress of Maritime
Discovery (1803). Southey reviewed the book in Annual
Review for 1803, 2 (1804), 12-20. BACK [4] Southey had
finished a version of Madoc in 1797-1799 and was revising it
for publication. It did not appear until 1805. BACK [5] Southey’s unfinished ‘History
of Portugal’. BACK [6] John II (1455-1495, King
of Portugal 1481-1495) sent a number of embassies to important West African
economic centres, including the city of Timbuktu. BACK [7] A street near Covent Garden, London, famous for its
second-hand clothing shops. BACK [8] Edward
Bayntun Yescombe (1765-1803), Captain of the packet, King
George, which sailed between Falmouth and Lisbon. He died on 11
August 1803, from wounds received when his ship was attacked by a French
privateer on 30 July 1803. The King George was taken to
the Spanish port of Vigo, and Southey lost his books. BACK [9] An edition
of ‘El Cantar de Mio Cid’, the oldest Spanish epic poem, probably from the
13th century. BACK [10] The Visigothic Code, promulgated in 642 and 654 and
translated into Spanish in the 13th century. BACK |
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