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 rce692 letterEEd.26.683 Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland College Park, MD August 15, 2011

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:>

Romantic Circles c/o Professor Neil Fraistat Department of English University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 fraistat@umd.edu

By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions: These texts and images may not be used for any commercial purpose without prior written permission from Romantic Circles. These texts and images may not be re-distributed in any forms other than their current ones.

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. Not previously published.

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
683. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, [c. 21 June 1802] Address: To/ C W Williams Wynn Esqr M.P./ Lincolns Inn/ LondonPostmark: [illegible]Endorsement: June 21 1802MS: National Library of Wales, MS 4811DUnpublished. Dear Wynn

In reply to your first letter – the statement of Mrs James’s circumstances is this. her four sons were drowned during the Easter week in our channel. from one of these she received 30 £ a year, of which his death deprives her & she has nothing. the subscription is set on foot to purchase her an annuity to that amount. 160 guineas have been raised here – I collected twelve in London – you mention eight more. She is 62 & it is expected from the nature of the case that 14 per cent may be procured.Mrs James (first name and dates unknown) had lost her four sons in a shipwreck earlier in 1802. Southey and his friends were attempting to raise money to invest in an annuity for her.

I have begun to transcribe the CidRodrigo Diaz de Bivar (c. 1040-1099), Castilian aristocrat and military commander, whose exploits were the subject of numerous poems and tales. Southey’s English translation and compilation of three of these was published in 1808 as The Chronicle of the Cid. for you, & that you may have it in a portable form, in the size of Thalaba. Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) had been published in octavo. besides I thought, as it will be so long before it can be printed you would like to have the manuscript as a preservable volume & in this shape what with notes & margin it will reach a hundred pages.

Miss Anna Sewards criticism I had not heard of till from you.Anna Seward’s critique of Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) appeared in The Poetical Register, and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, for 1801 (London, 1802), pp. 475-486. I suspect she resents upon me some remarks made by Coleridge on her sonnets.Southey was mistaken: Seward’s defence of the sonnet, The Poetical Register, and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, for 1801 (London, 1802), pp. 484-485, was a reply to an anonymous (not a Coleridgean) review of Thomas Le Mesurier (c. 1757-1822), Poems Chiefly Sonnets (1799), Monthly Review, 36 (October 1801), 147. howbeit her vituperative poems was qualified with abundant praise.Seward’s earlier, widely-published attack on Joan of Arc, ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’ (1797). this sugar & gall is a queer mixture – so damned sweet – & so damned bitter. what this <may be> I am not over anxious to see. the publication The Poetical Register, and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, for 1801 (1802) was a very similar publication to the Annual Anthology, combining poetry submitted by aspiring authors with work by more established figures. Its appearance demonstrated there was no longer enough space in the market for a further volume of the Annual Anthology. itself prevented Tobin from collecting a third AnthologyA projected but unrealised third volume of the Annual Anthology. for which I might else have manufactured sundry Ballads – but that threatened to strip the newspapers – & mine it was not worth while that I should write unless certain “remuneration” as the Don in the play calls it,Don Adriano de Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 3, scene 1, line 131. came from the Morning Post.Southey had given up writing regularly – and for payment – for the Morning Post in late 1799. Although he did contribute three poems in 1801, this was not on a scale likely to generate enough contributions for a third Annual Anthology. New-RiverA channel constructed in 1613 to bring fresh springwater from Hertfordshire to the city of London. water is not to be had gratis – & shall not HeliconIn Greek mythology, the fountain of the Muses was at the foot of Mount Helicon. be marketed? – These good people little think that the Jacobine Poet does nothing but collate chronicles, read Seraphic History, & hunt the search in the dunghills of monastic biography.

You shall receive the diabolana in my next.‘A True Ballad of a Pope’, Morning Post, 4 February 1803. I find a wide difference between the quiet of our situation here & the eternal interruptions in London from some of my thousand & one acquaintance. & yet there are some half-dozen whom I wish & want to be within reach. I have begun the tenth Kings reignJoão I (1357-1433; reigned 1385-1433), tenth king of Portugal. – which by the by will be nearly as long in my book as the other nine – for it is where the glorious period of Portugal begins. Now & then I do a little to MadocSouthey had completed a version of Madoc in 1797-1799 and was revising it for publication. It did not appear until 1805. – or to Kehama The Curse of Kehama, published in 1810. Southey had begun to draft Book 2 on 4 June 1802. – it is but little, but when I get to some interesting point I shall gallop over the ground. AmadisSouthey’s translation Amadis of Gaul (1803). takes me two hours daily which would be drudgery if I did not like the book so well. you cannot conceive how vile the English version is,Anthony Munday (c. 1560-1633; DNB), The Ancient, Famous and Honourable History of Amadis de Gaule (1589-1619). all the little traits of manners are dropt – the language every where vulgarized, & forge indecencies of thought & feeling as well as language introduced for which no hint is given in the Spanish. I wish you would bring the French copyNicholas de Herberay des Essarts (d. c. 1557), had translated the first eight books of Amadis of Gaul into French 1540-1548, and English readers tended to encounter the story first in this translation. of the first book with you on the next circuit. it would gratify me to see how much of this is Frenchmans work.

From Corry I have a sort of half information which makes me more anxious for the whole. Rickman has written a letter to me which has now been lying at Corrys a fortnight for his approbation. x he was to read frank & dispatch it. there it lies still – & by an after letter from R. I only learn that it allows me a free choice to continue with him or not about further connection with him. yet it seems R think I shall not have any further connection – because I had talked to him of fixing near London in case it was broken off, & he says he is glad pleased to think I shall settle in that neighbourhood. this puzzles me if the free choice be mine – who does not chuse a sinecure?

Where is Elmsley? I suppose in Scotland. do you know his direction?

God bless you – yrs R S.