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.
Bodleian Library, Don. d. 3. Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York, 1965), II, pp. 122–123.
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.
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 a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey'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.
Wordsworth & his wife are
within three minutes walk of you, – lodging at 24 Edward Street Cavendish Square. Call upon him, & if you give him a dinner,
get John May & John Coleridge to
meet him. He has left Hartley at Oxford, – think of that fish in a
Quadrangle! you remember his way of running round & round with his head on one side, – he has not yet left it off,
& I tell him that tho there is no hope of his squaring the circle,
I look to see you in August. 80£ will cover your journey <expences> upon a liberal allowance.
Would it not make your journey the pleasanter if Mariannexxxxx glad
to see Marianne & she will never have a better opportunity of seeing this country.
Tom begins to feel embarrasments come upon him thick & thronging, as you have long
foreseen. One immediate cause is that his house has been disfurnished to supply T. Taylors family who are come upon William& this xx in which I am daily making progress.
I am very sorry to hear Gooch is ill. Is it his asthma? or any thing worse?
You have not hunted out the Kraken
Poor Smithwho looked – he was the eldest son of
a half-pay officerdisease evil is far more serious at Cambridge than
has been publicly stated. The letter which brought me this ne tidings says that in three days Cambridge as to its
Colleges would be an uninhabited desert.
It would not surprize me if we were to have some fresh pestilence in Europe. The Influenza is perhaps some old
pestilence in a mitigated form, – worn out as diseases sometimes seem to be. Doubtless our habits preserve us from some of those
maladies which were of old so fatal, – but they may perhaps predispose us to others, – & the fever at Gibralter
I am in good hopes respecting the war. Buonaparte must be very weak, – or he would not court the Jacobines &
Carnotxxxx come to feel what a siege is the people may cut this scoundrels throat
& thus preserve themselves. He I think would be likely enough to fire the x city when he found the game
xxx hopeless.
Have you seen some capital political squibs in the Courier lately?