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MS untraced; text from Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick, ‘The Letters of Robert Southey to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (unpublished PhD, Harvard, 1967), pp. 156–159. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 331–333.
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.
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
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You do well to read travels, which are almost the only modern books worth reading. You speak of Pallas just as I
have spoken, for it fell to my lot to review his first volume in the first Annual.hand, because I suppose mine did not quite please the publishers of a dull & dear book. I have
not seen the other Travels which you mention. My own Letters I dislike because they would have been so infinitely better had I
kept them unpublished till this time.
I begged & besought you to borrow or steal for me the Welshmans book about the fairies, & I do again
intreat & implore you so to do.
Senhor
Señor (mark you how his title is spelt – he being a Spaniard) – in particular all the
documents about Joanna Southcote,
Madoc flourishes, – more than I had expected. it is a good poem, & on its present plan could not have been
better, still I feel in myself powers which could have produced a better.
I should have sent this off some days ago had not some visitors interrupted me. Among the tribe came a certain Mr
SmithBrummejam
l. – all that she could! – Senhora the more
I know of this world the odder sort of a place does it seem to me, – & the more I hear of women the more am I convinced of the
truth of an assertion which I often make in this family, – that men are scarce & valuable.
You are to make sundry drawings of this house which in four or five different situations form admirable subjects,
as you vary the background of mountains. We have an artists chair for you. & the Fores’s pencils which you commissioned me to
buy last year, – tho the best pencils in the world are made here at Keswick.
I am studying Swedenborgianism for Don Manuel.