“You have done many things which have given me great pleasure since your last letter. I never was more rejoiced than when Lord Grenville gave his full and manly support to a war which, beyond all others in which we have been involved, is necessary and inevitable. I am very glad, also, to see that you are doing something to promote vaccination. Much may be done towards the cure and prevention of diseases, by wise legislative interference; and this is one of the points in which the state of society is susceptible of great improvement. . . . .
“The question of incest was touched upon, and you very
properly recommended that the case of should rest upon the existing law, rather
than make it the subject of a specific (and superfluous) clause in the act of
divorce. But has it never occurred to you, my dear Wynn, that this law is an abominable relic of ecclesiastical
tyranny? Of all second marriages, I have no hesitation in saying that these are
the most natural, the most suitable, and likely to be the most frequent, if the
law did not sometimes prevent them. It is quite monstrous to hear judges and
lawyers speaking, as they have done of late, upon this subject, and confounding
natural incest with what was only deemed to be incestuous, in order that the
Church might profit by selling dispensations for its commission—a species
of marriage, too, which was not only permitted by the Levitical law, but even
| Ætat. 40. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 115 |
“Longman was to send you my poems. You will perceive how very few have been written since I was twenty-five, and that may account for the numberless and incorrigible faults, and the good-for-nothingness of a great part of them, which, had they been my own property, would have gone behind the fire.
“They have made me member of another academy at Madrid—the R. A. of History—a body which have rendered most efficient service to the literature of that country. This gives me some privileges*, which I should be very glad to profit by, if I could afford a journey to Spain, for I should have better access to archives and manuscripts than any foreigner has ever enjoyed.
“You will see in the next Quarterly a picture, which I found in M. Larrey’s book—Bonaparte sleeping in the Desert by a fire of human bodies and bones—the remains of travellers who had perished there, and been dried by the sun and sands! It is
* The same privileges as if he had been a member of the royal household. “I do not know,” he says in another letter, “how this will accord with the English privilege which I must use of speaking my free opinion of Ferdinand’s conduct.” |
| 116 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 40. |
“God bless you my dear Wynn.
