1768. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 4 April 1810
1768. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 4 April 1810 *
My dear Grosvenor
Thank your brother for me, – I am much obliged to him for satisfying me that no better account is to be obtained than the lame one which I have made up from the gazettes & newspapers. Unless I had the good fortune to fall in with Keat Sir R. Keats [1] or some intelligent officer who was on the spot. [2] – Thank you also for your zeal in the service of Poor Roberts’s family, – you will certainly find a season at Ealing, [3] when the matter may be mentioned xxx merely without indelicacy, – I have written to Stockwell [4] & shall attack Wynn.
When you see Elmsley remind him that I want my motto for Kehama put into Greek. [5] It was one of the thousand & one odd sayings of my Uncle William, [6] a strange half-witted man whose history would make an interesting page in the memoirs of my own life should I ever have leisure to leave such a work behind me. As some memorial of him I shall like to see him gravely quoted in Greek. Elmsley is therefore desired to refer to the sayings of Uncle William in good Christian Greek, – & he will pass for one of the Greek fathers.
God bless you
RS.
April 4. 1810
Notes
* Address: To/ G. C. Bedford Esqr/ [in another hand] no 9 Stafford
Row/ Pimlico/ J. C. Herries
Endorsement: 4 April 1810
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c. 24. ALS; 2p.
Unpublished. BACK
[2] Southey had hoped to obtain an account of the evacuation of the Spanish army from Denmark in 1808 from Captain Thomas Graves (d. 1834); see Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 21 March 1810, Letter 1763. For Southey’s account of these events, see Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1808, 1.1 (1810), 333–335. BACK
[3] Barré Charles Roberts was from Ealing, so this may be a reference to his father, Edward Roberts. BACK
[4] To solicit a subscription from Thomas Woodruffe Smith. BACK
