The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 21 April 1807
“Whether, Grosvenor, you will ascribe it to the cut of my nose, I cannot
tell; nor whether it be a proof of the natural wickedness of the heart, but so
it is, that I am less disposed to be very much obliged to the Treasury for
giving me 200l. a year, than I am to swear at the Taxes
for having the impudence to take 56l. of it back again.
And if it were a pull Devil pull Baker between that loyalty which, as you know,
has always been so predominant in my heart, and that jacobinism of which, you
know how vilely, I have been suspected, I am afraid the 56 would give a
stronger pull on the Baker’s side than the 144 on the Devil’s. Look
you, Mr. Bedford of the Exchequer, it is out of all
conscience. Ten in the hundred has always in all Christian states been thought
damnable usury; and to say that a man took ten in the hundred was the same as
saying that he would go to the Devil.* But this is eight-and-twenty in the
* So says the epigram attributed to Shakspeare, upon his friend
Mr. Combe, an old gentleman noted for his
wealth and usury:— |
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| Ætat. 33. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 81 |
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hundred, for which may eight-and-twenty hundred Devils .
. . . . I am a little surprised to hear you speak so contemptuously of modern
poetry, because it shows how very little you must have read, or how little you
can have considered the subject. The improvement during the present reign has
been to the full as great in poetry as it has been in the experimental
sciences, or in the art of raising money by taxation. What can you have been
thinking of? Had you forgotten Burns a
second time? had you forgotten Cowper,
Bowles, Montgomery, Joanna
Baillie, Walter Scott? to
omit a host of names which, though inferior to them, are above those of any
former period except the age of Shakspeare, and not to mention Wordsworth and another poet, who has written two very pretty
poems in my opinion, called Thalaba and Madoc. . . . . I am as busy in my household arrangements as you can be.
My tent is pitched at last, and I am thankful that my lot has fallen in so
goodly a land.
“Politics are very amusing, and go to the tune of
Tantara-rara. The king has been fighting for
a veto upon the initiation of laws, and he has won it. I had got into good
humour with the late ministry because of the Limited Service Bill, the
Abolishment
“Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved; ’Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved. If any man ask, ‘Who lies in this tomb?’ ‘Oh! oh!’ quoth the Devil,’ ’tis my
John-a-Combe.’” |
![]() It must be added that Mr. Knight strenuously opposes the tradition that
Shakspeare wrote these
lines.—Knight’s Shakspeare, a
Biography, p. 488. |
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| 82 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 33. |
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of the Slave Trade, and their wise conduct with regard to
the Continent. As for their successors, they have given a pretty sample of
their contempt for all decency by their reinstatement of Lord Melville, the attempt at giving Percival the place for life, and the threat
held out by Canning of a dissolution.
The Grenvilles now find the error of their neglecting
Scotland at the last election, an error which I heard noticed with regret at
the time. What is it has made them so unpopular in the city? It is to me
incomprehensible why the memory of Pitt
should be held in such idolatrous reverence,—a man who was as obstinate
in every thing wrong as he was ready to give up any thing good, and who, except
in the Union and in the Scarcity, was never by any accident right during his
long administration.
“I finish poor Henry
White’s papers to-morrow. One volume of Palmerin still remains to do, and then
there will be nothing to impede my progress in S. America. Our Fathers wrote to
me about the same time that you did; they were then in pursuit of the culprits
Hinchcliffe and Gildon. I’ll tell you what I would have
done had I been in town and could not have found them. I would have made them a
present of verses of my own, just enough in number to fill the gap, and dull
enough to suit them. Nobody would have suspected it, and it would have been a
very pious fraud to save trouble.
“It consoles me a little when I think of the reviewing*
that is to take place: how much more you
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| Ætat. 33. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 83 |
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will feel it than I shall. I am case-hardened—but
you—oh, Mr. Bedford, how your back
and shoulders will tingle! how you will perspire! how you will bite your nails
and gnash your teeth! how you will curse the reviewers,
and the printers, and the poor poets, with now and then a remembrance of me and
yourself. Why, man, there never was so bad a book before! If I were to take any
twenty pages and enumerate all the faults in them,—do you remember
Duppa, when he came from the
Installation at Oxford, all piping hot? even to that degree of heat would the
bare enumeration excite you, and your shirt would be as wet as if you had
tumbled into a bath. I tell you my opinion as a friend just to prepare you for
what is to come, and am actually laughing at the conceit of how you will look
when you take up the first review! Farewell!
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851)
Scottish poet and dramatist whose
Plays on the Passions
(1798-1812) were much admired, especially the gothic
De Montfort,
produced at Drury Lane in 1800.
Grosvenor Charles Bedford (1773-1839)
The son of Horace Walpole's correspondent Charles Bedford; he was auditor of the
Exchequer and a friend of Robert Southey who contributed to several of Southey's
publications.
William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850)
English poet and critic; author of
Fourteen Sonnets, elegiac and
descriptive, written during a Tour (1789), editor of the
Works
of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (1806), and writer of pamphlets contributing to the
subsequent Pope controversy.
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Scottish poet and song collector; author of
Poems, chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786).
George Canning (1770-1827)
Tory statesman; he was foreign minister (1807-1809) and prime minister (1827); a
supporter of Greek independence and Catholic emancipation.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
English poet, author of
Olney Hymns (1779),
John
Gilpin (1782), and
The Task (1785); Cowper's delicate
mental health attracted as much sympathy from romantic readers as his letters, edited by
William Hayley, did admiration.
Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742-1811)
Scottish politician, president of the board of control (1793-1801), secretary of war
(1794-1801); first lord of the Admiralty (1804-05).
Richard Duppa (1768-1831)
Writer and antiquary; a contributor to the
Literary Gazette; he
published
A Journal of the most remarkable Occurrences that took place in
Rome (1799) and other works.
Charles Gildon (1665 c.-1724)
English playwright and miscellaneous writer who attacked Alexander Pope and was
consequently mauled in the
Dunciad.
William Hinchliffe (1691-1742)
English poet and bookseller; he published
Poems, Amorous, Moral, and
Divine (1718).
Charles Knight (1791-1873)
London publisher, originally of Windsor where he produced
The
Etonian; Dallas's
Recollections of Lord Byron was one of
his first ventures. He wrote
Passages of a Working Life during half a
Century, 3 vols (1864-65).
James Montgomery (1771-1854)
English poet and editor of the
Sheffield Iris (1795-1825); author
of
The Wanderer of Switzerland (1806) and
The
World before the Flood (1813).
Spencer Perceval (1762-1812)
English statesman; chancellor of the exchequer (1807), succeeded the Duke of Portland as
prime minister (1809); he was assassinated in the House of Commons.
William Pitt the younger (1759-1806)
The second son of William Pitt, earl of Chatham (1708-1778); he was Tory prime minister
1783-1801.
Henry Kirke White (1785-1806)
Originally a stocking-weaver; trained for the law at Cambridge where he was a
contemporary of Byron; after his early death his poetical
Remains
were edited by Robert Southey (2 vols, 1807) with a biography that made the poet
famous.
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.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Madoc. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805). A verse romance relating the legendary adventures of a Welsh prince in Wales and
pre-Columbian America.
