“You may infer how incessantly I was engaged during my
abode in town from the 1st of November to the 27th of December, when you are
told that I could not possibly find time for writing more than the first six
pages of that paper in the
Quarterly Review, though the
number was waiting for it. The remainder was written at Caroline Bowles’s, where I
| 140 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 57. |
“When I met Joanna
Baillie at Rogers’s, her sister
and my daughter Bertha constituted the
whole party; for, as to literary parties, they are my abomination. She is a
person whom I admired as soon as I read her first volume of Plays, and liked when I saw her as much as I
had admired her before. I never talk much in company, and never carry abroad
with me the cheerful spirits which never forsake me at home. But I was not sad
that morning, though perhaps my thoughts might sometimes be more engaged than
they ought to have been by the engagements of various kinds which were pressing
upon me. Bertha said of me in one of her letters from town
that I used to look as if I had more to think of than I liked. This was only
because it was so much; not that I looked at the course of events with anything
like despondency. Very far from it; I found few persons so hopeful, so
confident, as myself; but those few were exactly the persons on whose judgment
I have most reliance. The Whigs have already increased the army, called for the
yeomanry force which they had disbanded, and begun to prosecute for sedition. I
expect to see them suspend the Habeas Corpus, reissue one-pound notes, and go
to war. We have at least a
| Ætat. 57. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 141 |
