The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part 2: 1798-1803 A Romantic Circles Electronic Edition Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 Lynda Pratt Romantic Circles General Editor, Neil Fraistat General Editor, Steven E. Jones Technical Editor Laura Mandell 2011-08-15 rce615 letterEEd.26.606 Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland College Park, MD August 15, 2011

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MS untraced; text is taken from Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, ‘Robert Southey and Miss Seton’, Times Literary Supplement (1937). Southey’s letters to Seton were advertised for sale in Kyrle Fletcher’s catalogue no. 57 (1936), Item 332. Their purchaser and current location is unknown. Previously published: Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, ‘Robert Southey and Miss Seton’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1868 (20 November 1937), 896.

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.

 NINES categories for Genre and Material Form at http://www.performantsoftware.com/nines_wiki/index.php/Submitting_RDF#.3Cnines:genre.3E on 2009-02-26 Architecture Artifacts Bibliography Collection Criticism Letters Drama Life Writing Politics Folklore Ephemera Fiction History Leisure Manuscript Reference Works Humor Education Music nonfiction Paratext Perodical Philosphy Photograph Citation Family Life Poetry Religion Review Visual Art Translation Travel Book History Law Southey Letters: Biographies Southey Letters: Places Laura Mandell XSLT Transforming after latest corrections Laura Mandell XSLT Transforming Averill Buchanan corrections from proofing Averill Buchanan Part II added
606. Robert Southey to Barbara Seton [fragment], [7 September 1801] MS: MS untraced; text is taken from Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, ‘Robert Southey and Miss Seton’, Times Literary Supplement (1937). Southey’s letters to Seton were advertised for sale in Kyrle Fletcher’s catalogue no. 57 (1936), Item 332. Their purchaser and current location is unknownPreviously published: Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, ‘Robert Southey and Miss Seton’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1868 (20 November 1937), 896.

.             .             .             .             there is a temptation upon me to publish my best at once, & remain with a whole inclination for the historySouthey’s unfinished ‘History of Portugal’.             .             .             .             .             Even English society will not make amends to me for English climate. The truth perhaps is that I never felt the want of it in Portugal. My Uncle with me was always the man of letters, & the many points in common to us quite hid the difference of age & the utter dissimilarity of opinions on more important but not every day topics. When I lost Miss Barker, I soon found you – your loss drove me to the old folios. I should miss Mrs GonneWife of William Gonne (d. before 1815), the packet agent at Lisbon. much, not that we often met – but there was always the possibility of meeting. However to any foreign country I should carry so much local ignorance as would make any common acquaintance interesting. The lowest Franciscan knows something which is worth knowing & I would willingly endure the odour of one of these oily garlicky fellows a whole evening to learn from him the history of his daily life. For this reason dull company has sometimes been interesting to me at Lisbon, & many a one there who never thought himself, has given me the materials of thinking. I am going seriously to work at French, so as to write & speak it. My Portuguese is easily converted into Italian – or Spanish should Madrid happen to be my place allotted, which I should hope it would not be, were it not for the old Spanish poets. My worst & least curable deficiency is the finger-fault. Zounds that I should be able to paint what I hear & feel – & yet so utterly at a loss to paint what I see. Were we but as near neighbours as we have been & as I heartily wish we were I should take your drawing book out in my walks & screw up my mouth to explain on my return in French that this stood for a church & that for a tree.