985. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 26 October [1804]

985. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 26 October [1804] ⁠* 

Dear Wynn

I will trouble you to frank the enclosed to Richard Duppa Esqr 13. Poland Street. Oxford Street – because being wholly on my own business, it is one of those letters for which it is not decorous either to pay postage myself, or suffer him to do it. Two days more will carry me thro Madoc, – two days after fifteen years! [1]  Ballantyne also does his work well, I am only five sheets ahead of him. the notes will not be printed so rapidly, but I think the whole will be done by Xmas & the work published about a month after that time. You know not, said Horne Took how proud a man feels when he is to be hung upon a charge of high treason. [2]  – you know not how consequential a man feels when he is about to send a quarto volume into the volume world. Here it seems a great event. there needs however nothing more to humble him than to walk into a London booksellers shop, or to take up a catalogue. But my book will not be lost in the crowd.

God bless you

RS.

Oct. 26.

Notes

* Address: [deletions and readdress in another hand] To/ C W Williams Wynn Esq M. P./ Wynnstay/ Wrexham. at Welshpool/ Montgomeryshire –
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298; WREXHAM/ 202
MS: National Library of Wales, MS 4811D. ALS; 2p.
Unpublished. BACK

[1] Southey’s poem Madoc, published in 1805. BACK

[2] John Horne Tooke (1736–1812); DNB), radical reformer and historian of language, who was tried for treason in 1794, and acquitted. BACK

Addressee

Wynn, Charles Watkin Williams (1775–1850)

People mentioned

Duppa, Richard (c. 1768–1831) (mentioned 1 time)
Ballantyne, James (1772–1833) (mentioned 1 time)
The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Three
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