“I am greatly obliged to you for the efficient and timely assistance* which you have given to a publication that needs all the aid it can muster. Longman proposed it, not because there was any call for such an edition, but because he did not like that Galignani should have the market to himself. My own intention was to prepare for a posthumous collection, which I was confident would prove a good post-obit for my children. The Conscript Fathers of the Row thought that the present ought not to be neglected for prospective views, and I gave up my own opinion, thinking that they were better qualified
* Dr. S. Mackenzie had reviewed the new edition of my father’s poems in the Liverpool paper which he conducted, and had strongly urged him, by letter, not to be too brief in his autobiographical prefaces. |
| 344 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 63. |
“What I aimed at in my Prefaces was to say neither too little nor too much, and to introduce no more of my own history than was naturally connected with the rise and progress of the respective poems. But of this there will be a great deal. Many years ago I began to write my own Life and Recollections in letters to an old and dear friend. About half a volume was produced in this way, till it became inconvenient to afford time for proceeding,—and, to confess the truth, my heart began to fail. This, no doubt, is the reason why so many autobiographies proceed little beyond the stage of boyhood. So far all our recollections are delightful as well as vivid, and we remember everything; but when the cares and the griefs of life are to be raised up, it becomes too painful to live over the past again.
“Doubtful, or more than doubtful, as it is, whether I
shall ever have heart to proceed with these letters,
| Ætat. 63. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 345 |
“Wat Tyler is printed in the second volume, and in the third there will be the Devil’s Walk at much greater length than it has ever appeared.
“You will have your reward for refusing to conduct a journal that aims at a mischievous end. The time is fast coming when it will be seen that measures of true reform are to be expected from those only one of whose chief endeavours it is to preserve what is good.
“Farewell, my dear Sir, and believe me always,
