“The bookseller sent me the first volume of your unpublished series. Some things in it I wished away; with very many more you know how truly I must be delighted. Lucullus and Caesar especially pleased me, as one of the most delightful of these conversations throughout.
“You will not suppose that I am one of the sudden converts to Catholic Emancipation. Those conversions have the ill effect of shaking all confidence in public men, and making more converts to parliamentary reform than ever could have been made by any other means. For myself, I look on almost as quietly at these things from Keswick as you do from Florence, having done my duty in opposing what I believe to be a most dangerous measure, and comforting myself with the belief that things will end better than if it had been in my power to have directed their course. I suppose the next movement of the Irish Catholics, when the next movement of the drama begins, will be put down by the Duke of Wellington with a high hand; but the ghost of the Catholic Question will be far more difficult to lay than the Question itself would have been: there will be a great emigration of Protestants from Ireland; the struggle will be for Catholic domination there, and we shall have the war upon a religious ground, not upon a civil pretext.
“We are likely to have Historians of the American
| Ætat. 55. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 45 |
“My health, thank God, is good, and the operation I underwent last June has restored me to the free use of my strength in walking, a matter of no trifling importance for one who was born to go a-foot all the days of his life. I can now once more climb the mountains, and have a pleasant companion in my little boy, now in his eleventh year. Whatever may be his after fortunes, he will have had a happy childhood, and, thus far, a happy boyhood. The change which my death would make in his happiness, and in that of others, is the only thing which casts a cloud over my prospect towards eternity, I wish I could see you and your children; and I have a hope that this may yet be, though I know not when.
“God bless you!
