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Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously published: Charles Ramos, The Letters of Robert Southey to John May: 1797–1838 (Austin, Texas, 1976), pp. 137–139.
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 ought ere this to have replied to your last letter. I was from home when it arrived, on a weeks visit to Wordsworth, & there it followed me. You know my employments, – but not my dissipations, which in a very natural process multiply to rob me of time as time becomes more valuable. From June to November this place is any thing rather than a retirement. The task of tuition also, tho managed with as little fatigue as possible, occupies daily an hour & half, which, tho I read by snatches even then, is lost to regular employment.
As soon as I returned from Rydale I wrote to G Coleridge, & have received from him as satisfactory a reply as could be
expected or desired, tho much yet remains to be adjusted.in so many
cousins who are so well known & stand so high in the University, & has undoubtedly on that account the more force. 2dly He says that it might be preferable to send him as an independent member notwithstanding the additional
expence; & at the expiration of two years, if the immediate college prospects were not promising, place him somewhere as an
Usher; where from the emoluments of his situation he might support himself, & keep annually one or two terms, till he had
compleated the number requisite for his degree, & for admission into Orders. To effect this he says that if Lady Beaumont & Poole would
advance all that they offered for four years, in the space of two there would then be 80 £ per year, which the Ottery family would
double, making thus 160 £. – I incline to this latter plan, – because I have great hopes that Hartley will make friends at College, as he has never failed to do every
where else, which will make his success certain there; – & because if College Prospects fails, he cannot be made independent
too soon, nor subject to the discipline of self controul too early. But I wait to see Wordsworth before I reply to G Coleridge; & I am in
daily expectation of him. Meantime my poor old friend Cottle has offered an annual
five guineas toward this object: & if it be necessary, Wordsworth will
contribute 20 £. per year. Of Coleridge himself all I can learn is from Cottle,
Now then for myself. And first I must once more thank you for taking care of me at the Insurance Office &
supplying my deficits there. My great historym Nicol,r
Walpole,
My poem
There shall be a long article of mine upon the English Poets in the next Quarterly,quandary lest the middle part should be lost, – which would be the loss of a weeks labour. I
have just begun a paper upon the moral statistics as they may be called, to show what has been done toward real, practicable radical reform
in this country, – & what remains to do.rs May – & God bless you