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.
British Library, Add MS 47891. Not previously published.
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.
Last night I received your note. My notion as to the manner of discharging the high officea subject almost too much subject, – because let the writer do what he will, he will
rather <is in danger of> falling short of what the events lead the public to expect: – & to publish this
by itself in some such form as the Giaour,x to the xxxxx
Prince, pitched in somewhat of a solemn key, saying something about the
office itself, of those who have held it heretofore, of myself, & of the manner in which it behoves me to address him.
This I shall set about immediately on my return.
The Leveexxxxxx commanding me to dine with him. Neither of these things are likely, but I dare not take my place till both dangers
are over, & this exposes me to the risk of not finding one for Friday evening when I go in the morning to look for it.
As for the office you know me well enough to smile at the apprehensions of anyone who fears that I may degrade myself
by the manner of discharging it. Common sense would prevent me from doing this, even if x any better principle were wanting.
Believez-vous me, Senhora, that however inferior my Laureat verses may be to those poems in which my whole heart & mind have been
employed, they will be among those which xxx will do me most honour hereafter.
What you say about Roderic
I am in haste. It is now 9 o clock – I have already written one hasty letter & breakfasted; & among the
business of the morning is that of seeing Miss Linwoods pictures,r Burgessbed small bed-rug, like a horse cloth, to wrap round me in the mail, & fear
neither cold nor fatigue. On the contrary I shall be more at rest when I have fairly seated myself in the corner of the coach, – than
at any other moment since I left home.
And now God bless you all. I expect a line from Edith tomorrow.
& shall write in reply to it.
I shall think of the ceremony of the coronation crowning upon the road.