“It is surprising to me that men whose fortunes are
not absolutely desperate at home will go to India to seek them; that is, men
who have any feelings beyond what is connected with the sense of touch.
Fourteen years’ transportation is a heavy sentence; Strachey, I think, has been gone seventeen.
What a portion of human life is this, and of its best years! After such an
absence the pain of returning is hardly less severe, and perhaps more lasting,
than that of departure. He finds his family thinned by death; his parents, if
he finds them at all, fallen into old age, and on the brink of the grave; the
friends whom he left in youth so changed as to be no longer the same. What
fortune can make amends for this! It is indeed propter vitam vivendi perdere causas! I grieve to think
sometimes that you and I, who were once in such daily habits of intimate
intercourse, meet now only at intervals of two or three years;
| 110 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 40. |
“I thought that rascal Murat might have done more mischief. The proper termination of his career would be that the Sicilian Bourbons should catch him, and send him to Madrid; and I think Louis the Eighteenth would now be fully justified in sending Prince Joseph to the same place. The contest in France cannot surely be long; if Bonaparte could have acted with vigour on the offensive, he would have found perilous allies in Saxony, and little resistance from the Belgians. But the internal state of France paralyses him; and if he acts on the defensive, he can derive no advantage from the injustice of the great German powers. Two things were wanting last year,—the British army did not get to Paris, and the French were neither punished as they deserved, nor humbled as the interests of the rest of the world required. It will, I trust, now be put beyond all doubt that they have been conquered, and that their metropolis has been taken.
“The second edition of Roderick is selling well. It will
probably soon reach to a third, and then fall into the slow steady sale of its
predecessors. The sale will become of importance, when by the laws of literary
property it will no longer benefit the author in his family. This is an
abominable injustice, and
| Ætat. 40. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 111 |
“God bless you, my dear Wynn!
