“Since you heard from me, I have scarcely seen a face
but those of my own family, nor been farther from home than Friars’ Crag,
except one fine day, which tempted me to Lord
William Gordon’s, The weeks and months pass by as rapidly
as an ebb tide. The older we grow the more we feel this. The hour-glass runs
always at the same rate; but when the sands are more than half spent, it is
then only that we perceive how rapidly they are running out. I have been close
at the desk this winter. The Quarterly takes up a heavy portion of my time. You would see in the
last number two articles of mine—one upon the History of English Poetry, the other upon Forbes’s Travels, both deplorably injured by
mutilation. The next number will have a pretty full abstract of Lewis and Clarke’s Travels. All these things cost me more time than
they would any
| Ætat. 40. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 103 |
“I know not that there is anything farther to tell you of myself, unless it be, that I have written the first book of Oliver Newman, and that it is in irregular rhymes. We are all, thank God, tolerably well. Herbert goes on stoutly with his Greek, and last week he began to learn German, which I shall acquire myself in the process of teaching him.
“How is James going on? This I am anxious to hear. The Income Tax was laid on with great injustice; it is taken off, not because it pressed with a cruel weight upon those of small fortune, but because it took in a proper proportion from the great landholders and capitalists, who cannot be got at in an equal degree by any other manner. For instance, Lord —— pays probably 10,000l. a year to this tax. Nothing that can be substantiated for it can by possibility take from him a tenth part of that sum. The tax ought not to be continued; but I would have given it one year longer, that Government might have been enabled, with as much facility as possible, to wind up the accounts of a long war, unexampled alike in its duration, importance, and expense. Not to have done this will lower the English people in the eyes of other nations; but of all people under Heaven who have any country to boast of, we are the least patriotic.
