Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
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. 68–70.
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.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I suspect that my two letters directed to you
on the Chester Circuit as you desired, had not reached you
when you last wrote or there would have been no charge of
idleness in yours. & now having acquitted myself of that
charge I proceed to the indictment of my ears. If the charge
had come from Dapple it would not have surprized me. one may
fancy him possessed of more than ordinary susceptibility of
ear; but for the irritability of yours I cannot so
satisfactorily account. I could heap authority upon
authority for using two very short syllables in blank verse
instead of one. they take up only the time of one. Spirit in particular is repeatedly
placed as a monosyllable in Milton, − & some of his ass
editors have attempted xx to
print it as one − not feeling that the rapid pronunciation
of the two syllables does not lengthen the verse more than
the dilated sound of one. The other line you quote is still
less objectionable, because the old Ballad style requires
ruggedness − & because
were this line rugged − & secondly because the line
itself rattles over the tongue as smoothly as a curricle
upon xxx down turf. I have
made candles of infants fat − & this kind of cadence is
repeatedly used in the Old Woman & in the Parody.
The Grandmothers Tale
Of my late volume the worst pieces in my own
judgement are the Complaints of the Poor & the
Rose.
I am very curious to see Barkers sketch.
On May-day if no accident intervene I expect to be in town −