“If I were not very well acquainted with your disposition, I should apprehend, by your long silence, that you are offended with me. In one letter I spoke too warmly, but you know my affections are warm. I was sorry at having done so, and wrote to say so. The jolting of a rough cart over rugged roads is very apt to excite tumults in the intestinal canal; even so are the rubs of fortune prone to create gizzard grumblings of temper.
“Now, if you are not angry (and, on my soul, I believe you and anger to be perfectly heterogeneous), you will write to me very shortly; if you are, why you must remain so for a fortnight: then, it is probable, I shall pass two days in London, on my way to Cambridge; and, as one of them will be purely to be with you, if I do not remove all cause of complaint you have against Robert Southey, you shall punish him with your everlasting displeasure.
| Ætat. 21. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 229 |
“From Horace, too, I hear nothing. Were I on the Alleghany Mountains, or buried in the wilds of Caernarvonshire, I could not have less intercourse with you. Perhaps you are weaning me, like a child. And now, Bedford, I shall shortly see G. S.*, if he be in London or at Trinity. Two days in London: one with you, when I shall call on him; the other with some friends of Coleridge, and correspondents of mine, admirable poets and Pantisocrats. How will G. S. receive me? is he altered? will he be reserved, and remember only our difference? Or is there still the same goodness of heart in him as when we first met? I feel some little agitation at the thought. G. S. was the first person I ever met with, who at all assimilated with my disposition. I was a physiognomist without knowing it. He was my substance. I loved him as a brother once: perhaps he is infected with politesse; is polite to all, and affectionate to none.
“Coleridge is a man who has every thing of —— but his vices; he is what —— would have been, had he given up that time to study, which he consumed you know how lamentably.
“I will give you a little piece which I wrote, and which he corrected. ’Twas occasioned by the funeral of a pauper, without one person attending it.†
“I like this little poem, and there are few of mine of which I can say that.
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* A schoolfellow with whom he had once been very intimate. † Here follows “The Pauper’s Funeral,” printed among my father’s minor poems. |
| 230 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 21. |
“Bedford, I can sing eight songs;—1. The antique and exhilarating Bacchanalian, Back and Sides go Bare. 2. The Tragedy of the Mince Pie, or the Cruel Master Cook. 3. The Comical Jest of the Farthing Rushlight. 4. The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty. 5. The Godly Hymn of the Seven Good Joys of the Virgin Mary; being a Christmas Carol. 6. The Tragedy of the Beaver Hat; or, as newly amended, The Brunswick Bonnet; containing three apt Morals. 7. The Quaint Jest of the Three Crows. 8. The Life and Death of Johnny Bulan.
“Now I shall outdo Horace! . . . . Farewell, and believe me always
