“Murray states
that having conversed with Heber and
some other literary friends upon my proposed History of the
Monastic Orders, ‘he now comprehends its probable interest
and popularity,’ and shall be happy to come to ‘closer
quarters upon the subject.’ He says something of future papers
for the Quarterly Review, asking
me to undertake the Pepys’ Memoirs and Sir Thomas
Brown’s Works, and writes requesting a brief sketch of my
monastic plan. I have told him little more than that it may be included in six
octavo volumes, and comprises matter hardly less varied and extensive than
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. If he
| Ætat. 50. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 187 |
“The ‘medical practitioner’ would not have puzzled you if Fortune had permitted us to have been somewhat more together during the last ten years. Yet you have heard from me the name of Doctor Daniel Dove, and something, I think, of the Tristramish, Butlerish plan of his history, which, if the secret be but kept, must, I think, inevitably excite curiosity as well as notice. I have lately taken a pleasant spell at it, and have something more than a volume ready; that is to say, something more than half of what I propose to publish, following it or not with as much more according to its sale and my own inclination. One reason why I wished for you here at this time was to have shown it to you, and to have had your help, for you could have excellently helped me, and I think would have been moved in spirit so to do. If I finish it during the winter, of which there is good hope, I will devise some pretext for going to town, where I must be while it is printed, to avoid the transmission of proofs, by which it would be easy, from calculation of time, to ascertain how far they had travelled, and so of course to discover the author, to whom the printers are to have no clue.
“God bless you!
