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 rce767 letterEEd.26.758 Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland College Park, MD August 15, 2011

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. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 306-307.

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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 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
758. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 4 February 1803 Address: To/ C W Williams Wynn Esqr. M.P./ Lincolns Inn/ LondonPostmarks: FREE/ FEB 4/ 1803; [partial] BRISTOL/ FEBEndorsement: Feb. 4 1803MS: National Library of Wales, MS 4811DPreviously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), I, pp. 306-307. Dear Wynn

Yours has safely reached me. you are I believe aware that from my situation out of the city, it is impossible to acknowledge a letter by return of post.

I am heartily glad that your opinion of the Edinburgh attempt at Thalabacide differs so little from my own.The review of Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) by Francis Jeffrey in Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63-83. for tho perhaps our lists of bad expressions, lines & passages might differ, mine would probably be the longest. On the whole I am fully satisfied with the reception the poem has found, such approbation in private as most gratifies me, & such public censure as attracts attention, & <will> makes the subject remembered when the censure itself is forgotten. has the Anti-Jacobin yet noticed it? Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) was not reviewed by the Anti-Jacobin. However, it was described in passing as a ‘monster of composition’, Anti-Jacobin Review, 16 (October 1803), 205. from the manner in which Wordsworths poems were reviewed there, Lyrical Ballads (1800) was given a brief, favourable review in the Anti-Jacobin, 5 (April 1800), 434: describing it as containing ‘genius, taste, elegance, wit and imagery of the most beautiful kind’ and its author as possessing ‘a mind at once classic and accomplished’. The reviewer was William Heath (1749-1854). I should have suspected Gifford of writing there. I have read his lifeWilliam Gifford had published The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1802), the ‘Introduction’ to which told his life story in some detail. – & forgiven him all his x sins – even his notes to the Intercepted Letters.Probably Copies of Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypt (1798), which had gone into numerous expanded editions since its first publication by the loyalist bookseller and propagandist John Wright (1770/71–1844; DNB). his Juvenal has been most infamously reviewed in the Critical. Critical Review, 36 (September 1802), 10-17, (October 1802), 188-192 and (November 1802), 316-327. Gifford replied with An Examination of the Strictures of the Critical Reviewers on the Translation of Juvenal (1803), in turn savaged in the Critical Review, 38 (July 1803), 337-341. by the passages selected there for abuse I have little doubt that his opinion of poetical language would agree very nearly with my own.

Coleridge has been lately with me. he is going abroad for his health. he talks of making a poem upon the Cids death.Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (c. 1040-1099), Castilian nobleman and military commander. He died peacefully at Valencia, the city he had conquered. Coleridge did not carry out his intention to write a poem on this subject. I wish it may be something more than talk.

I have a heavy job on hand – almost all the Last Year Voyages & Travels to review! Annual Review for 1802, 1 (1803), 7-30, 35-43, 45-56, 62-73, 89-101, 207-218, contained Southey’s reviews of the following travel books: Martin Sauer (fl. 1802), An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia … by Commodore Joseph Billings (1802); Alexander MacKenzie (1763/4-1820; DNB), A Narrative, or Journal of Voyages and Travels through the North-West Continent of America (1802); Christian August Fischer (1771-1829), Travels in Spain in 1797 and 1798 (1802); Giuseppe Acerbi (1773-1846), Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, to the North Cape (1802); Maria Guthrie (d. 1800), Tour, Performed in the Years 1795-6 through the Taurida , or Crimea (1802); Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire in 1793 and 1794 (1802-1803); Guillaume Antoine Olivier (1756-1814), Travels in the Ottoman Empire (1801); and Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society (1800-1801).

God bless you R S. Feby. 4. 1803.