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MS untraced; text is taken from John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856). Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 422–424.
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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Your letter has too long lain unanswered; an apparent neglect which you will easily account for, and which I trust
you will be more ready to excuse in me than I am to excuse in myself. I should blame myself the more if all which I could possibly
say upon the subject of your disappointment at Cambridge must not already and often have occurred to your own reflections; as, for
instance, that your purpose in going to the University was not to obtain college honours (things in themselves not less
mischievously than preposterously overrated), but to qualify yourself for one of the most useful and honourable offices in
society, that of a minister of the Church of England; and that this end having been obtained, it is neither right nor reasonable
to repine if you have failed in gaining a collateral object of unmeasurably less importance.
Mr. Tillbrook
Tillbrook thinks you may perhaps know something of his correspondents. Had he any confidential friend to whom he
was in the habit of writing? Tell me anything you know which may direct me in these enquiries. Poor fellow, had he never applied
to me for advice, he would not thus have been cut off from all hopes!
I expect to see Neville in less than three weeks, for I purpose
running over to Flanders for a month’s excursion in company with my brother
Henry and his bride. Neville
has been strenuously aiding him in a canvass for the Middlesex Hospital, and I believe has been the most zealous and most useful
of his friends.
It is well that you were not in Cambridge during the last calamitous sickness,
P.S. All who recollect you here, desire to be kindly remembered. Hartley is of Merton College, Oxford, and is now spending the vacation with his father at Calne, in Wiltshire.