“You will have thought me very remiss in not thanking
you sooner for the Vision, if
you did not remember that I had been travelling from Dan to Beersheba, and take
into consideration how little opportunity can be found for the use of pen and
ink in the course of a series of runaway visits, during a journey of nine
hundred miles. It was given me at the Admiralty the very day that it arrived
there. I opened it on the spot, discovered that a letter to Polwhele had been inclosed to me, in time for
Croker to rectify the mistake by
making a fair exchange, and thus saving mine from a journey to the Land’s
End. If, however, I have not written to you about D.
| Ætat. 38. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 315 |
“It is remarkable that three poets should at once have
been employed upon Roderick. I have a tragedy of Landor’s in my desk, of which Count Julian is the hero: it contains some of the
finest touches, both of passion and poetry, that I have ever seen. Roderick is also the pre-eminent personage of my
own Pelayo, as far as it
has yet proceeded. Differing so totally as we do in the complexion and
management of the two poems, I was pleased to find one point of curious
comparison, in which we have both represented Roderick in the act of confession, and both finished the
picture highly. Our representations are so totally different, as to form a
perfect contrast; yet each so fitted to the temper in which the confession is
made, that it might be sworn, if you had chosen my point of time, you could
have written as I have done, and that if I had written of the unrepentant king,
I should have conceived of him
| 316 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 38. |
|
“‘Then Roderick knelt
Before the holy man, and strove to speak:
“Thou see’st,” he cried; “thou
see’st”—but memory
And suffocating thoughts represt the word,
And shudderings, like an ague fit, from head
To foot convulsed him. Till at length subduing
His nature to the effort, he exclaimed,
Spreading his hands, and lifting up his face,
As if resolved in penitence to bear
A human eye upon his shame,—“Thou see’st
Roderick the Goth.” That name would have sufficed
To tell its whole abhorred history.
He not the less pursued—“the ravisher!
The cause of all this ruin!” Having said,
In the same posture motionless he knelt,
Arms straightened down, and hands dispread, and eyes
Rais’d to the monk, like one who from his voice
Expected life or death.’”
|
“I saw but little of Gifford in town, because he was on the point of taking wing for the Isle of Wight when I arrived. The Review seems to have shaken the credit of the Edinburgh, and might shake it still more. The way to attack the enemy with most effect is to take up those very subjects which he has handled the most unfairly, and so to treat them as to force a comparison which must end in our favour. I am about to do this upon the question of Bell and Lancaster—a question on which —— has grossly committed himself.
“You may well suppose that three months’ idleness
has brought upon me a heavy accumulation of business. Meantime good materials
for the third year’s Register have reached me from Cadiz, and I have collected others
respecting Sicily and the Ionian Islands. I saw the last volume on my road, and
| Ætat. 38. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 317 |
