“At last I have received the books*,—a rich cargo, in which I shall find much to amuse, and not a little to profit by. As yet, I have only had time to catalogue them, and look into them as this was done. In so doing, I saw that you had given a Jesuit the lie, for what he said of the cause of the first rebellion. A lying Jesuit he is; but in this instance the falsehood is merely chronological. The Long Parliament passed a decree, forbidding all persons to bow at the name of Jesus; Sir Edward Dering made a very eloquent speech upon the occasion, which I shall send you ere long in the little sketch of our Church history which I am preparing. This decree was subsequent to the Irish massacre. The fact which the Jesuit might have dwelt upon with advantage is, that the intolerance of the Parliament seeking to enforce the penalty of death against recusant priests, when Charles, like his father, was inclined to toleration, gave a pretext for the rebellion, and furnished those who instigated it with means for alarming and enraging the populace.
|
* A present of various foreign books from Mr. Landor. |
| 106 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 47. |
“I shall send your letter to Wordsworth, who will, I am sure, be much gratified at seeing what you say of him. His merits are every day more widely acknowledged, in spite of the duncery, in spite of the personal malignity with which he is assailed, and in spite of his injudicious imitators, who are the worst of all enemies.
“Nothing can be more mournful than the course of
events abroad. All that the Spanish-Americans wanted they would have obtained
now, in the course of events, without a struggle, if they had waited quietly. A
free trade could not, from the first, have been refused them, nor any internal
regulations which they thought good; and now the separation would have taken
place unavoidably. As it is, it has cost twelve years of crime and misery. It
is a most interesting part of the world for its natural features, for what we
know of its history, and for what we do not,—how some parts should have
attained to so high and curious a state of civilisation, and how the greater
part of its inhabitants should have sunk so completely into savages. I will
send you, in the next package, Humboldt’s Travels, as far as they are published. He
is among travellers what Wordsworth is
among poets. Of Italian nobility I would take your opinion without hesitation,
knowing nothing of them myself; but in Spain and Portugal I would have had a
house of peers, were it only in respect to great names, and those heroic
remembrances which are the strength and glory of a nation. The nobles were, for
the most part, deplorably degenerate; but as a bad spirit had degraded, a
| Ætat. 47. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 107 |
“Since the disappearance of the Queen’s fever this country has been unusually calm: little is heard of distress, and less of disaffection. Of the latter we shall hear plentifully when the bills of restriction are expired, and of the former also, when it shall be found (as it will be) that the renewed activity of our manufacturers will have again glutted the South American markets.
“God bless you!
