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MS untraced; text is taken from Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849-1850). Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.) Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols (London, 1849-1850), II, pp. 124–126 [in part; undated].Dating note: Dating from internal evidence. This letter was written very shortly after Southey returned to Lisbon on 28 October 1800.
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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About Harry, it is necessary to
remove him, – his room is wanted for a more profitable pupil, and he has
outgrown his situation. I have an excellent letter from him, and one from William Taylor, advising me to
place him with some provincial surgeon of eminence, who will for a hundred
guineas board and instruct him for four or five years; – a hundred guineas!
well, but thank God, there is Thalaba ready, for which I ask this sum. I have
therefore thus eat my calf, and desired William Taylor to inquire for a situation, – and so once more goes
the furniture of my long expected house in London.
The plague, or the yellow fever, or the black vomit, has not yet reached us, nor do we yet know what the disease is, though it is not three hundred miles from us, and kills five hundred a day at Seville! Contagious by clothes or paper it cannot be, or certainly it would have been here. A man was at Cintra who had recovered from the disease, and escaped from Cadiz only seventeen days before he told the story in a pot-house here. In Cadiz it might have been confined, because that city is connected by a bridge with the main land; but once beyond that limit, and it must take its course, – precautions are impossible; the only one in their power they do not take, – that of suffering no boat to come from the opposite shore. Edith is for packing off to England, but I will not move till it comes, and then away for the mountains.
Our weather is most delightful, – not a cloud, cool enough to
walk, and warm enough to sit still; purple evenings, and moonlight more distinct
than a November noon in London. We think of mounting jackasses and rambling some
two hundred miles in the country. I shall laugh to see Edith among the dirt and fleas, who
I suspect will be more amused with her than she will with them. She is going in
a few days to visit the nuns: they wanted to borrow some books of an English
woman, – ‘What book would you like?’ said Miss Petre,good book; we liked it,
because the characters are so moral and virtuous.’ By the
by, they have sent Edith some
cakes.
We are afraid the expedition under Sir Ralph Abercrombie