Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
Sir Walter Scott to Robert Southey, 8 July 1824
“Do you remember Richardson’s metaphor of two bashful lovers running
opposite to each other in parallel lines, without the least chance of union,
until some good-natured body gives a shove to the one, and a shove to the
other, and so leads them to form a junction? Two lazy correspondents may, I
think, form an equally apt subject for the simile, for here have you and I been
silent for I know not how many years, for no other reason than the uncertainty
which wrote last, or, which was in duty bound to write first. And here comes
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my clever, active, bustling
friend, Mrs Hughes, and tells me that
you regret a silence which I have not the least power of accounting for, except
upon the general belief that I wrote you a long epistle after your kind present
of the Lay of the Laureate, and
that I have once every week proposed to write you a still longer, till shame of
my own indolence confirmed me in my evil habits of procrastination—when here
comes good Mrs Hughes, gives me a shake by the collar, and
assures me, that you are in pretty nearly the same case with myself—and, as a
very slight external impulse will sometimes drive us into action when a long
succession of internal resolutions have been made and broke, I take my pen to
assure my dear Southey, that I love him
as well as if our correspondence had been weekly or daily. The years which have
gone by have found me dallying with the time, and you improving it as usual—I
tossing my ball and driving my hoop, a greyheaded schoolboy, and you plying
your task unremittingly for the instruction of our own and future ages. Yet I
have not been wholly idle or useless—witness five hundred acres of moor and
moss, now converted into hopeful woodland of various sizes, to the great
refreshment, even already, of the eyes of the pilgrims who still journey to
Melrose. I wish you could take a step over the Border this season with
Mrs Southey, and let us have the
pleasure of showing you what I have been doing. I twice intended an invasion of
this sort upon your solitude at Keswick, one in spring 1821, and then again in
the summer of the same year when the coronation took place. But the convenience
of going to London by the steam-packet, which carries you on whether you wake
or sleep, is so much preferable to a long land journey, that I took it on both
occasions. The extreme ![]()
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rapidity of communication, which
places an inhabitant of Edinburgh in the metropolis sooner than a letter can
reach it by the post, is like to be attended with a mass of most important
consequences, some, or rather most of them good, but some also which are not to
be viewed without apprehension. It must make the public feeling and sentiment
of London, whatever that may chance to be, much more readily and emphatically
influential upon the rest of the kingdom, and I am by no means sure that it
will be on the whole desirable that the whole country should be as subject to
be moved by its example as the inhabitants of its suburbs. Admitting the
metropolis to be the heart of the system, it is no sign of health when the
blood flows too rapidly through the system at every pulsation. Formerly in
Edinburgh and other towns the impulse received from any strong popular feeling
in London was comparatively slow and gradual, and had to contend with opposite
feelings and prejudices of a national or provincial character; the matter
underwent a reconsideration, and the cry which was raised in the great mart of
halloo and humbug was not instantly echoed back, as it may be in the present
day and present circumstances, when our opinion, like a small drop of water
brought into immediate contiguity with a bigger, is most likely to be absorbed
in and united with that of the larger mass. However, you and I have outlived so
many real perils, that it is not perhaps wise to dread those that are only
contingent, especially where the cause out of which they arise brings with it
so much absolute and indisputable advantage. What is Wordsworth doing? I was unlucky in being
absent when he crossed the Border. I heartily wish I could induce him to make a
foray this season, and that you and Mrs Southey, and
Miss Wordsworth, my very good ![]()
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and well remembered friend,
could be of the party. Pray think of this, for the distance is nothing to well
resolved minds, and you in particular owe me a visit. I have never quite
forgiven your tour in Scotland without looking in upon my poor premises. Well,
as I have re-appeared like your floating island, which I see the newspapers
aver hath again, after seven years’ soaking, become visible to mortal
ken, it would not be fair in me to make my visit too long a one—so, with
kindest respects to Mrs Southey, in which my wife
sincerely joins, I am always most truly yours,
“8th July, 1824, Edinburgh.
“Address Abbotsford,
Melrose.
“You may have heard that about four years since
I was brought to death’s door by a violent, and at the same time most
obstinate complaint, a sort of spasms in the stomach or diaphragm, which
for a long time defied medicine. It gave way at length to a terrific course
of calomel, such as made the cure almost as bad as the disease. Since that
time, I have recovered even a better portion of health than I generally had
before, and that was excellent. I do not indeed possess the activity of
former days either on foot or horseback, but while I can ride a pony, and
walk five or six miles with pleasure, I have no reason to complain. The
rogue Radicals had nearly set me on horseback again, but I would have had a
good following to help out my own deficiencies, as
all my poor neighbours were willing to fight for Kirk and King.”
Mary Anne Hughes [née Watts] (1770-1853)
Literary hostess, the wife of Thomas Hughes of Uffington (1756-1833); she contributed to
the
Literary Gazette and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott and
Caroline Bowles Southey. She was the grandmother of the author of
Tom
Brown's Schooldays.
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
English printer and novelist; author of
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
(1739) and
Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady
(1747-48).
Edith Southey [née Fricker] (1774-1837)
The daughter of Stephen Fricker, she was the first wife of Robert Southey and the mother
of his children; they married in secret in 1795.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)
The sister of William Wordsworth who transcribed his poems and kept his house; her
journals and letters were belatedly published after her death.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
