“. . . . . Heartily glad I am to be at my own desk by my own fireside, and once more at rest. In London I could not find any time for writing anything; it was less interruption to let in all callers than to receive and answer notes if they were excluded. I was at the most important debates which I could attend conveniently, because my quarters were with Rickman. I walked into the city on the Lord Mayor’s Day, and the day before, and saw the sort of multitude which had been brought together for mischief, and from various quarters I heard what the mischief was,—a Cato-street scheme, with this difference only, that instead of attacking the Ministers at a dinner party, the King and the Duke of Wellington were to have been killed in their carriages, and the new police massacred.
| 142 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 57. |
“The Quarterly Review was kept waiting for my paper. But yet I have a great deal to say upon the state of public affairs, both through the medium of the Quarterly and in other ways. As soon as possible I mean to address a series of letters to the people.
“Murray is now reprinting my Moral and Political Papers, in a small cheap form, like his Family Library. About half a volume is printed, and in revising them for the press it is mournful to see that they are in the main as applicable now as when they were written; and that much of the present evil might have been averted if the warning which was then given had been taken in time. The evil has now, I think, become so great that it must draw on a remedy. And it is like a special judgment upon the Whigs, who have raised the devil, that they should be in a position which makes it their business to lay him if they can. They must do everything which they used to declaim against; and happily they can do it, because there will be no factious opposition to them.
“The Duchess of Kent
sent for me one day to dine with her; the reason, as I learnt from Sir John Conroy, being that she thinks of
making a northern tour with the little Princess, and intended to ask me what tour she should take, and
what time it would require. No such questions, however, could the Duchess ask;
for there were more than twenty persons at dinner, of whom I only got at the
names of those nearest me, and of course she could have very little
conversation with me. I took it quietly,
| Ætat. 57. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 143 |
“God bless you!
