“. . . . . Are there any remains at Shrewsbury of the
Amphitheatre which in Elizabeth’s
reign had been made there in an old quarry between the city walls and the
Severn? Churchyard the poet (a
Shrewsbury man) describes it as holding ten thousand spectators; the area
served for bear-baiting, wrestling, &c., and
| 106 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 56. |
“Danish is so easy and straightforward a language that you may make yourself acquainted with it without study, while you are studying German; and enlarge your vocabulary thereby, without confounding your grammar. Danish seems to me the easiest language into which I have ever looked, not excepting Spanish and Portuguese; but German is as difficult as Greek, and the difficulty is very much of the same kind. I am glad you are under the necessity of acquiring the one; the other you cannot help acquiring. Lamentable experience makes me know how much is lost by a monoglot traveller: that epithet, perhaps, is not exactly what should be applied to myself, who get on with a mingle-mangle of many languages, put together without regard to mood, tense, gender, number, or person; but my ear is the very worst in the world at catching sounds, and I have therefore more difficulty in understanding others than in making them understand me. . . . .
“Do not think anything which relates to the manners or
appearance—the in- or out-of-door nature—of a foreign country,
unworthy of noticing in your journal or note-book. At your age I was satisfied
with two or three lines of memoranda, when the same objects would now give me
good matter for
| Ætat. 56. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 107 |
“We are in no slight danger here: unless the Whigs are
alarmed in time at the progress of their own opinions. In this country there
are symptoms of their being so. But it must be a strong sense of their own
danger in the men of property that can save us from a popular parliamentary
reform in the
| 108 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 56. |
“Meantime it is a comfort to know that though man proposes, the disposal is ordered by a higher power. God bless you!
