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University of Rochester, Rare Books Library. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 92–96.Dating note: dating suggested by Curry in ‘Missing letters and missing names’.
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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Southey's spelling has not been regularized.
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I have been for the last seven days incessantly at work upon my old volume of Letters,
Nothing makes me so melancholy as to ‘call over the names’ at Westminster. I tried to find out Combe in London, but he was not to be heard of at the Temple. It is about six years since I saw him. Both he and I have grown into men with as little change as possible in either and yet, after a few minutes, there was a dead weight upon me which was not to be shaken off. We met with the heartiness of old and thorough familiarity – something like a family feeling; but it was necessary to go back to school, for the moment we ceased to be schoolboys there was nothing in common between us. We had no common acquaintance or pursuit, and I feel that of all things in the world there is nothing more mortifying than to meet an old friend from whom you have had no weaning, and to find your friendship cut through at the root.
A Westminster man of our times, though I cannot for the life of me remember him, travelled with me from Liverpool –
a Captain Murray.
I prophesied about the Spaniards at Bedford’s to William
Nicol
Mr. T. Southey’s conduct is literal madness beyond a
doubt. My brother Tom, knowing nothing of his quarrel with his sister, called there on his way to Plymouth; he was with the haymakers, and had
his back towards him when he approached. ‘How d’ye do, sir?’ says Tom; and ‘How d’ye
do?’ he answered, without turning his face. ‘You seem very busy, sir.’ ‘Very busy.’ Not a word more; so that Tom could not avoid saying, ‘I think, sir, you don’t seem glad to see me.’ ‘I never
desire to see any of the family.’ Tom then went to the house to look for his aunt, and heard from the servants that ‘he had used her worse than a dog,’ and
turned her out of doors. She herself is a woman whose spirit has been long since broken down, and who would bear, and did bear, a
great deal in the hope of serving us; and even now she begs me to say nothing which can offend him, because she thinks I am not
quite out of his good graces. And I believe this very fear of making him displeased with me prevents her from coming here, as I
have urgently requested her to do. It does not fall to every man’s lot to have had two such precious uncles.
I wish you a boy with all my heart: for myself, it will perfectly satisfy me if what I look for about the same time should prove a girl. The prospect of a large family gives me no uneasiness whatsoever. If it please God to let me go through the career which I have begun, they will be well provided for; and if it be His will to call me away, they will find friends, and I shall find that justice which is as seldom denied to the dead as it is granted to the living.
Can you procure for me Dick Adderley’s address?
God help us! it is perilous travelling, when a man turns out of the broad turnpike way of the world; and yet night and morning do I thank God for leading me into the by-path which has brought me where I am. Oh, that you could at this moment see the moonlight upon Derwentwater, and the cloud in which the moon herself is hidden!