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Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 72. 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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I have behaved very ill to you, – & am very conscious of having done so. You wrote me a letter twelve months
ago which contained one of the most affecting stories I ever read, & which asked me about the fitness of Oxford as a
professional station. I began a reply, – something interrupted it; – it got into my desk, & there shared the fate of too many
others, – being xxxxxxx buried under the <a> daily accumulation of correspondence. Its purport was
that I could only give you one introduction to Oxford, which is to the Chemical Professor Dr Kidd, an old school-fellow of mine, & a good-natured man; – that I would do my best to obtain
others from Heber, an all-sufficient person in this case, – but that I thought it a
bad place for any person of your profession, because of Grosvenorsmalaria which I would shun like the Pontine
marshes.
Now to your recent letter. You may be assured that if it were in my power to render service to any person for whom
you were interested I should be most happy to exert myself. But tho at this xxxxxx time I want employment, or
promotion, for my brother, I am endeavouring to obtain it from Mr Croker thro the interference of a third person, because I
cannot solicit it myself. Mr Croker is a man in power, a man
of business, & a man of letters. In the first of these characters there is, for one of my habits, no attraction; – in the
second – a good deal to repel, – & my acquaintance with him xxxx xxxx in the third is less than, I dare say, it
otherwise would be, if he were not so deeply engaged in official duties, & if he were upon a level with me in worldly
circumstances. I am beholden to him for many civilities & for some acts of unsolicited kindness. He asked the office of
historiographerr Perceval were living I believe it would have <been> given me) & he
obtained for me this Laureateship, which I did not desire, but which I could not have declined without cowardice, & to which I
shall return the respectability which <that> originally belonged to it.
I saw Davy a few days before his departure. The alleged object of his
journey is to examine the extinct volcanoes in Auvergne.of at whose bloody hands no man of right feelings would ask xxx, nor, without the excuse of pressing
necessity, accept one. I was not sorry to perceive that he felt this himself, & betrayed the feeling by endeavouring to show
that what he had done was right, when nobody told him it was wrong.
Among many things which interested me in our conversations at Taunton, you told me of your recovery from
consumptive symptoms, under the care of the pugilistic professors.
Here is no room for the Epitaph.