“I am very glad to see Herries’s appointment. By all that I have heard for many years past, a more unfit person than —— could not possibly have been in that situation; to get him out, and to have so efficient a man in his stead, is indeed a great point. It is the very place in which I have wished to see Herries. I hope and trust, now, that such means as the existing laws afford will be steadily employed for checking the license of the press. The radical country papers continually lay themselves open to prosecution; and I am certain that repeated prosecutions would go far towards stopping the mischief which they are doing at present, and have so long been doing with impunity. A strict watch over these, and over Cobbett, would soon suppress them.
| Ætat. 48. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 133 |
“I know nothing of the sale of my book; Murray has not written to me since it appeared. Only two opinions of it have reached me, except those of my friends,—one in a complimentary letter from Mr. Littleton, the member for Staffordshire; the other in a letter of the ci-devant Grand Parleur, which Rickman sent me; and certainly nothing could be more flattering than what he said of it,—that it was ‘a Thucydidean history, which would last as long as our country and our language.’ I must confess, however, that I am not aware of any other resemblance than what the title suggests; though I have always flattered myself that my other historical work might, in more points than one, be compared with Herodotus, and will hereafter stand in the same relation to the history of that large portion of the new world, as his work does to that of the old.
“We had an adventure this morning, which if poor Snivel* had been living would have set up her bristles in great style. A foumart was caught in the back-kitchen: you may, perhaps, know it better by the name of pole-cat. It is the first I ever saw or smelt; and certainly it was in high odour. Poor Snivel! I still have the hairs which we cut from her tail thirty years ago; and if it were the fashion for men to wear lockets, in a locket they should be worn, for I never had a greater respect for any creature upon four legs than for poor Sni. See how naturally men fall into relic-worship; when I have pre-
* A dog belonging to Mr. Bedford in early days. |
| 134 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 48. |
“To give you some notion of my heterogeneous reading, I am at this time regularly going through Shakspeare, Mosheim’s Ecc. Hist., Rabelais, Barrow, and Aitzema, a Dutch historian of the seventeenth century, in eleven huge full folios. The Dutchman I take after supper, with my punch. You are not to suppose that I read his work verbatim: I look at every page, and peruse those parts which relate to my own subjects, or which excite curiosity; and a great deal I have found there.
“We have not seen the face of the earth here for fifteen days,—a longer time than it has ever been covered with snow since I came into the country. I growl at it every day. It seems a long while since I have heard from you. God bless you!
