“This poor wretched paper-hanger* has sent me another letter, because I did not reply to his first. Men are too prone to take offence at importunity, finding anger a less uncomfortable emotion than pity; this indeed it is; and for that reason I scold
* See p. 238. |
| Ætat. 43. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 245 |
“The tide seems to be turning, and if Government will but check the press they would soon right themselves. In this part of the country I hear that travellers (the bagmen) collect their money more easily than on their last rounds, and receive more orders. A fellow was selling Cobbett’s twopenny Register and other such things at Rydal the other day; he was, or appeared to be, a sailor, and his story was that he was going to Whitehaven, and a gentleman had given him these to support himself on the road by selling them.
“In grief and in uneasiness I have often caught myself
examining my own sensations, as if the intellectual part could separate itself
from that in which the affections predominate, and stand aloof and contemplate
it as a surgeon does the sufferings of a patient during an operation. This I
have observed in the severest sorrows that have ever befallen me, but it in no
degree lessens the suffering. And whenever I may have any serious malady, this
habit, do what I may to subdue it, will tend materially to impede or prevent
recovery. But in petty vexations it has its use. I was more vexed than I ought
to have been about this publication of Wat Tyler; for though I shook off the first thoughts, or rather
immediately began to consider it in the right point of view as a thing utterly
unimportant; still there was an un-
| 246 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 43. |
