“The very wish which you have expressed to me, that your sons should become acquainted with my kinsmen (who, though my first cousins, are of their generation, not of yours or mine), I had formed, and was thinking of expressing to you. I dearly love inherited attachments, and am never better pleased than when I see a likelihood of their striking root.
“Your bishop
(Dr. Philpotts) was at the head of
the school when I entered it in its midway form, so there should be four or
five years’ difference in our age. Of course I well remember him, because
of his station; but had he been in any other part of the school among the οι
πολλοι, I should call him to
| 52 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 55. |
“Whether the seed which I have scattered in my Colloquies will produce fruit in due season I perhaps may not live to see; but some of it appears to have taken root. Among the letters pertinent and impertinent which have reached me relating to it, there are two from strangers which show this. The one is from Sir Oswald Mosely, about the Church Methodists, entering into the views which I have expressed, and proposing to form an association for furthering their progress. Upon this subject I have declined giving him any opinion till I shall have seen Sadler the member for Newark, whom I have engaged to see at Lowther in the autumn, and who, I know, takes much interest in this attempt. The other relates to the scheme for directing the personal charity of females to hospitals rather than prisons; to the sick rather than to the profligate. This is from Mr. Hornby, the Rector of Winwick, who had before hinted at such a thing in a sermon preached upon the opening of the Liverpool Infirmary, and who now offers his purse and his personal exertions to promote it. You will readily suppose that I am gratified by this. But I have neither time nor inclination, nor talents to take upon myself any part in forming such societies. If the voice of one crying in the mountains is heard, all that I am capable of doing is done. . . . .
“One way in which I feel the effect of time is that I
| Ætat. 55. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 53 |
