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 rce860 letterEEd.26.851 Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland College Park, MD August 15, 2011

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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.

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851. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 11 November [1803] Address: To/ C W Williams Wynn Esqr. M.P./ Wynnstay/ WrexhamStamped: KESWICK/ 298Endorsement: Nov 11/ 1803MS: National Library of Wales, MS 4811DUnpublished. Dear Wynn

From your long silence I was beginning to be apprehensive that you might be ill. I now write under an apprehension of a different nature – lest you should have sent me a draft which has miscarried – as in the Falmouth case. the last you gave me was in London, & my finances are now drained.

Thank you for the extracts. I have not the books you refer to at hand, & must leave the finish of the Welsh partSouthey had finished a version of Madoc in 1797-1799 and was revising it for publication. It did not appear until 1805. till to be compleated somewhere else whenever the poem be printed – an event to which I now look on as my first ononymous labour. It gives me an awful kind of feeling – for it is now fifteen years since I first took up the subject – & almost as long since you first heard of it. so many hours have been devoted to it – it has occupied so many of my thoughts & feelings – & when it is once gone forth I shall feel as if my harvest was got in & the winter hard at hand.

I do not leave this place this winter as you seem to imagine. indeed if my health stands the spring I know not where better to pitch my tent for this is a lovely country. Some six months hence I must perhaps move to see Madoc thro the press – & in that case shall prefer Edinburgh to London, being nearer, & because I have never seen it – & my brother Harry will be there. My plan is to print the book myself & get subscriptions – that is names, not publishing this intention, till I have first felt whether or not it be likely to succeed. the price shall be a guinea – it shall be printed in quarto if that price will allow it – if not in a smaller size. I am puzzled for a device for your arms – if you were CWWW of MathrafalThe ancestral home of the Kings and Princes of Powys. It featured in Madoc, hence Southey’s lament that it was not connected to Wynn, to whom the poem was dedicated. – one might have a view of the place & hang the shield from an old oak.

God bless you. R S.

Friday Nov. 11. Keswick.

I have Bayleys Poems to review. if my gentleman had been aware of this he would not have struck the first blow. he quotes heathen Greek upon me & I will have my revenge in plain English. Peter Bayley (1778-1823; DNB), Poems (1803). The first poem in the collection, ‘An Apology for Writing’, lines 46-55 and Note, attacked Southey’s Joan of Arc (1796) and (1798), deploying a quotation in Greek from Plato. Southey contributed a coruscating review of the book to the Annual Review for 1803, 2 (1804), 546-552.

I have found a name for our present government in Milton.John Milton (1608-1674; DNB), Reason of Church-Government Urg’d Against Prelaty (London, 1642), p. 40. – a Duncery. does it not suit admirably?