The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Chauncy Hare Townshend, 10 December 1818
“You made the best use of your misfortune at Kendal.
The most completely comfortless hours in a man’s life (abstracted from
all real calamity) are those which he spends alone at an inn, waiting for a
chance in a stage-coach. Time thus spent is so thoroughly disagreeable that the
act of getting into the coach, and resigning yourself to be jumbled for
four-and- twenty or eight-and-forty hours, like a mass of inert matter, becomes
a positive pleasure. I always prepare myself for such occasions with some
closely-printed pocket volume, of pregnant matter, for which I should not be
likely to afford leisure at ![]()
| 330 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 45. |
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other times. Erasmus’ Colloquies stood me in good stead for
more than one journey; Sir Thomas
More’s Utopia for another. When I was a school-boy I loved travelling, and
enjoyed it, indeed, as long as I could say omnia mea
mecum; that is, as long as I could carry with me an
undivided heart and mind, and had nothing to make me wish myself in any other
place than where I was. The journey from London to Bristol at the holidays was
one of the pleasures which I looked for at breaking up; and I used generally to
travel by day rather than by night, that I might lose none of the expected
enjoyment I wish I had kept a journal of all those journeys; for some of the
company into which I have fallen might have furnished matter worthy of
preservation. Once I travelled with the keeper of a crimping-house at Charing
Cross, who, meeting with an old acquaintance in the coach, told him his
profession while I was supposed to be asleep in the corner. Once I formed an
acquaintance with a young deaf and dumb man, and learnt to converse with him.
Once I fell in with a man of a race now nearly extinct,—a village
mathematician; a self-taught, iron-headed man, who, if he had been lucky enough
to have been well educated and entered at Trinity Hall, might have been first
wrangler, and perhaps have gone as near towards doubling the cube as any of the
votaries of Mathesis. (Pray write a sonnet
to that said personage.) This man was pleased with me, and (perhaps because I
was flattered by perceiving it) I have a distinct recollection of his
remarkable countenance after an interval of nearly thirty years. He laboured
very ![]()
| Ætat. 45. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 331 |
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hard to give me a love of his own favourite pursuit;
and it is my own fault that I cannot now take the altitude of a church tower by
the help of a cocked hat, as he taught me, or would have taught, if I could
have retained such lessons.
“It is an act, not absolutely of heroic virtue, but of
something like it, my writing to you this evening. Four successive evenings I
have been prevented from carrying into effect the fixed purpose of so doing;
first by the General’s dropping in
to pass the last evening with me before his departure, then by letters which
required reply without delay. And this afternoon, just before the bell rang for
tea, a huge parcel was brought up stairs, containing twenty volumes of the
Gospel Magazine; in which
dunghill I am now about to rake for wheat, or for wild oats, if you like the
metaphor better.
Yours affectionately,
Robert Southey.”
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)
English statesman and humanist, Catholic martyr; he was the author of
Utopia (1516).
William Peachey (1763 c.-1838)
Of Gosport, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; he was lieutenant-general in the 10th
Hussars and was a Tory MP for Yarmouth (1797-1802) and Taunton (1826-30). He corresponded
with W. L. Bowles and Robert Southey.
Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798-1868)
Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was a poet, writer for
Blackwood's Magazine, and close friend of Charles Dickens.
The Era. (1838-1939). A weekly theatrical periodical.
