1983. Robert Southey to John James Morgan, 13 November 1811
1983. Robert Southey to John James Morgan, 13 November 1811 *
Keswick. Nov. 13. 1811
My dear Morgan
I wrote to you rather than Coleridge because what I have to say will make more impression upon you than upon him. These Lectures [1] he will not write, & I am very very anxious that they should not be lost. Will you therefore press upon him the fitness of having them taken down in short-hand, as a duty which he owes to himself, & his friends & his family & the world. No doubt he will assent to it, – but this is all he will do; – now let me beseech you to xxxxx take upon yourself the trouble of procuring a short-hand writer, & thus become the means of their preservation. You I am sure will feel the importance of this as strongly as I do.
I am interrupted –
Yrs very truly
R Southey
Notes
* MS: Beinecke Library, Chauncey Brewster Tinker MS Collection, GEN MSS 310, Box 13,
folder 556. ALS; 1p.
Previously published: Kenneth Curry (ed.), New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols (London and New York,
1965), II, p. 12. BACK
[1] Coleridge’s lecture series on Shakespeare, Milton and the English poets, begun at Scot’s Corporation Hall, Fleet St, London, on 18 November 1811 and finished on 27 January 1812. Notes were taken by J. Tomalin (fl. 1811), published in T. M. Raysor, Coleridge’s Shakespearian Criticism 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), II, pp. 56–230; and John Payne Collier (1789–1883; DNB), Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton by the Late S. T. Coleridge (1856). BACK
