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.
National Art Library, London, MS Forster 48 D.32 MS 14. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), II, pp. 225–27.
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
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
Print your tragedy
The concluding lines of the Tragedy are not yet what they should be, – if they had been you would not have asked my
judgement of them.their all that they write, – a true one never suspects a passage of his own to be imperfect without cause – his
suspicions are of the nature of conscience.
Scott you see x is writing upon Rodrigo.see hear what work he has made for the poets of the 19th century. I am anxious to see his poem, there will be a good deal of splendour in it no doubt, – but visions are
difficult things to handle –
Have you seen Miss Sewards Letters? She had been “assured” that the
author of Gebir reviewed it himself in the Critical Review, & that I was the editor of that Review, – facts of which the one is
just as true as the other.myself.& but she never could get more than glimpses of its merits, glimpses however she did get, & this would
have appeared if she had not been (in my opinion) ill used by the man to whom she left her letters for publication.xxxxxx made her appear to be xx given some of her hastiest & most violent expressions which pass now for her settled
judgement, because the letters in which they were qualified, or xxxxx or retracted do not appear. In another point she has
been ill-used. It was her desire that they should be published in portions, at intervals of two years between each – the reason of this
certainly was that by the time the latter portions were published, some persons there spoken of, would in the natural course of years
have dropt off, – it is very evident to me that that strange part of her own history relating to Col. T. & his wife, was never
meant to be made public while they lived, & they being of her own age, would in all likelihood have been dead, before that portion
of the correspondence was publishable, according to her will.& to <bringing into light> all that that fellow spawns in the Ed. Review, & he, as might have <been>
foreseen had no other thought than how to make the greatest immediate profit by the bequest, in utter contempt of the conditions which
accompanied it – because they were stated as the wish of the testatrix, – & therefore were not binding in law.
Fellowes who speaks so cavalierly of Gebir in those letters published some poems himself,in as far as I could judge from dining once in company with him.
We set out for the South on Monday next, & shall be a week on the road. Direct to me at the Revd. Herbert Hill’s, Streatham, Surry, any time for the next month. – Sir Ed. Littleton I find has left Bath. Shall I find you there or at Llanthony about the end of July? or will any wind blow you to London?