“No communications have ever surprised me so much as those which I have this day the honour of receiving from you. I may truly say, also, that none have ever gratified me more, though they make me feel how difficult it is to serve any one who is out of the way of fortune. An unreserved statement of my condition will be the fittest and most respectful reply.
“I have a pension of 200l.
conferred upon me through the good offices of my old friend and benefactor,
Charles W. Wynn, when Lord Grenville went out of office; and I have the
Laureateship. The salary of the latter was immediately appropriated, as far as
it went, to a life insurance for 3000l. This, with an
earlier insurance for 1000l, is the whole provision that
I have made for my family; and what remains of the pension after the annual
payments are made, is the whole of my certain income. All beyond must be
derived from my own industry. Writing for a livelihood, a livelihood is all
that I have gained; for having also something better in view, and therefore
never having courted popularity, nor written for the mere sake of gain, it has
not been possible for me to lay by anything. Last year, for the first time in
my life, I was provided with a year’s expenditure beforehand. This
exposition might suffice to show how utterly unbecoming and unwise it would be
to
| Ætat. 60. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 257 |
“My life insurances have increased in value. With these, the produce of my library, my papers, and a posthumous edition of my works, there will probably be 12,000l. for my family at my decease. Good fortune, with great exertions on the part of my surviving friends, might possibly extend this to 15,000l., beyond which I do not dream of any further possibility. I had bequeathed the whole to my wife, to be divided ultimately between our four children; and having thus provided for them, no man could have been more contented with his lot, nor more thankful to that Providence on whose especial blessing he knew that he was constantly, and as it were immediately, dependent for his daily bread.
“But the confidence which I used to feel in myself is
now failing. I was young, in health and heart, on my last birth-day, when I
completed my sixtieth year. Since then I have been shaken at the root. It has
pleased God to visit me with the severest of all domestic afflictions, those
alone excepted into which guilt enters. My wife, a true helpmate as ever man
was blessed with, lost her senses a few months ago. She is now in a lunatic
asylum; and broken sleep, and anxious thoughts, from which there is no escape
in the night season, have made me feel how more than possible it is that a
sudden stroke may deprive me of those faculties, by the exercise of which this
poor family has hitherto been supported.
| 258 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 60. |
“Under these circumstances, your letter, Sir, would in other times have encouraged me to ask for such an increase of pension as might relieve me from anxiety on this score. Now that lay sinecures are in fact abolished, there is no other way by which a man can be served, who has no profession wherein to be promoted, and whom any official situation would take from the only employment for which the studies and the habits of forty years have qualified him. This way, I am aware, is not now to be thought of, unless it were practicable as part of a plan for the encouragement of literature; but to such a plan perhaps these times might not be unfavourable.
“The length of this communication would require an apology, if its substance could have been compressed; but on such an occasion it seemed a duty to say what I have said; nor, indeed, should I deserve the kindness which you have expressed, if I did not explicitly declare how thankful I should be to profit by it.
