The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey
Robert Southey to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 15 April 1821
“Keswick, April 15. 1821.
“. . . . . I have received invitations to dine with
the Literary Fund . . . . . and with the Artists’ Benevolent Institution.
These compliments were never before paid me. Cobbett also has paid me a compliment equally well-deserved and
of undoubted sincerity. He marks me by name as one of those persons who, when
the Radicals shall have effected a reformation, are, as one of the first
measures of the new government, to be executed. As a curious contrast to this,
the committee of journeymen who propose to adopt ![]()
| Ætat. 46. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 65 |
![]()
what is
practicable and useful in Owen’s
plan, quote in their Report the eleventh stanza of my ode* written in Dec 1814, as deserving
“to be written in diamonds.” This is the first indication of a sort
of popularity which, in process of time I shall obtain and keep, for the
constant tendency of whatever I have written. . . . . Wordsworth was with me last week. Oddly
enough, while I have been employed upon the Book of the Church, he has been writing a
series of historical
sonnets upon the same subjects, of the very highest species of
excellence. My book will serve as a running commentary to his series, and the
one will very materially help the other; and thus, without any concerted
purpose, we shall go down to posterity in company. . . . .
“God bless you!
Grosvenor Charles Bedford (1773-1839)
The son of Horace Walpole's correspondent Charles Bedford; he was auditor of the
Exchequer and a friend of Robert Southey who contributed to several of Southey's
publications.
Robert Owen (1771-1858)
English reformer who operated the cotton mill at New Lanark in Scotland and in 1825
founded the utopian community of New Harmony in Indiana.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
