The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to John Rickman, 20 February 1811
“. . . . . I have it under the hand of
—— that any new ministry must
recall our troops from Spain and Portugal,—to which I replied by praying
that he might stay out of place so long as he thought so. . . . .
“. . . . . When I read L.
Goldsmid’s* book about France, the impression it made upon me was, that he was
sent over by Bonaparte to further his
purposes here. God knows by what other means, but specially by publishing such
outrageous and absurd stories against him as should give
his good friends a plea for disbelieving anything against a man who was so
palpably calumniated. For instance, that B.,
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| 306 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 36. |
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when at the military college, poisoned a woman who was
with child by him; that this is a lie, I know, because I happen to know a
person resident in the same town, at whose house B. was in
the habit of visiting, and from whom I learnt that his character was exactly
what you would suppose—very studious and very correct. That it must be a
lie is obvious, because such things could not be done with more impunity in
France than in England; and to say that it might have been concealed, leads to
the obvious question, ‘If so, how came L. Goldsmid
to know it?’ A still grosser and more ridiculous story is, that
Bonaparte makes his poison by giving arsenic to a pig,
and tying the pig up by the hind legs, and collecting what runs from his mouth.
. . . .
“Now, the man is no fool, and it is not possible that
he can believe this himself, or that he can suppose it can be believed by any
person of common sense. For what purpose, then, can he publish such lies?
“If he be the rascal which I take him to be, his
newspaper shows what is the main purpose for which he has been sent
over—to put the Bourbons into Bonaparte’s hands. He recommends a Bourbon to be at the
head of the army in Spain—a Bourbon to land in France. Now, there can be
no doubt this is what B. would above all things desire. .
. . .
Lewis Goldsmith (1764 c.-1846)
English journalist and pamphleteer; as a Jacobin he published
The
Crimes of Cabinets (1801) and as an anti-Gallican,
The Secret
History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte (1810).
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
John Rickman (1771-1840)
Educated at Magdalen Hall and Lincoln College, Oxford, he was statistician and clerk to
the House of Commons and an early friend of Charles Lamb and Robert Southey.
