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:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
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.
Houghton Library, Harvard, fMS Eng 776, f. 20 copied by George Bloomfield in his 11 June letter to Thomas Hill, Letter 239.
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish 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 —
Bloomfield'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.
I beg leave to give you my sincere thanks for your Minor Minstrel,war.
* Matthew 5, 39 V,
Dear Sir I have beg'd of Mr Hill to give these Lines a place in his
Poor Henry Kirk White did him justice
But Henry is dead to—
Oh for a scrap of Latin or Greek to tagg this with but Allass I am no scholar———In this happy Country bless’d as we are with A free
press. The Rich and the poor acquire A
degree of knowlege, unknown in less happy LandsThe poorest Men have oppinions of their own, and however silly those oppinions may be, they will if
able express them.—My Brothers and my self placed amongst the poorerest of the poor, have through Life been much amused by the bustle
and strife amongst The higher classes of society for
wealth and power,But poor Nat who have some talent wrote A poem, an
Assay on War indeavouring to prove that War is a natural consequence of the rapid increase of Man, And though to be deplored, is
mercifully suffered by kind providence, as War is mercy itself compared with faminePoor Nat little thought what A dressing he would receive from the snarling Critics !! Those Nameless Critics seemed
to have A rancorous spite at Capel Lofft, The Editor (Than whom a better meaning man never existed)
And sneering said,
another Bloomfield poor Mr L thought he had found A whole Nest of poets !!!
— Nats poems certainly possess Merit of A poetic kind but those Gentlemen would admit of no species Merit as to his
augument they Scouted it as Derogatory to the human Charracter !!!:: Are mankind then like the brute creation, !! –
forced by instinct into propogate their
Species, blindly, as if they were not endowed with reason !!—In short they hunted him down as if he were A mad Dog,
And yet since that when the Revd Mr Malthurst proposed to Check the increase of population that Gentleman was as
Roughly handled as Nat—
When Mr Holoway published his
Minor Minstrel he made me a present of A Coppy, And as I had
Corrisponded with that author Very freely I wrote the following Letter to him, I felt hurt to find A poem in that
collection extreemly severe against Nats augument, holding up War as the most dreadfull and sinfull of all the curses attendant on humanity It struck me that as Mr H
and Nat are both admirers of the Christian Morality and are certainly as far as they can practical Christians it were
a pity they seemd to differ, Had Mr H been placed Like Nat amongst the poor, his Views Might have been like Nats, he
never had a near View of real positive want of employment or in other word the real want of the nessaries Nescessaries of Life, had he seen this he would not wonder that the
thousands Of poor fly to Arms and with joy take up the Terrible Trade of Soldier,Dec 28
th1822