351. Robert Southey and Edith Southey to Thomas Southey, 5 October [1798]

351. Robert Southey and Edith Southey to Thomas Southey, 5 October [1798] *
[start of section in Edith Southey’s hand]
A Ballad
Shewing how an old Woman rode double & who rode before her.
_____________
[end of section in Edith Southey’s hand]
Martin-hall. Oct. 5.
My dear Tom.
Your aunt Molly was in town at the fair, & she has brought up a long rig-ma-role of gossiping about you & some Miss Kitty. but who Miss Kitty is your gossiping aunt forgot by the way.
I have been home some fortnight or three weeks, & set sail again on Monday on a cruise with Danvers, chiefly with the intention of seeing Maber, & learning something about sending Edward to St Pauls. the boy is shockingly managed now. I shall be from home not more than ten days, we walk, & I shall have the pleasure of seeing the bogs & waterfalls of the Black Mountains in Brecknockshire.
My mother continues well, & all things go on smoothly at Martin hall. My Letters & Poems [3] will both make their appearance about Xmas, my Kalendar [4] begins to look respectable in size, & I have begun the seventh book of Madoc. [5] As for the Domdaniel, [6] there is not room left in this sheet to explain enough of it to you. suffice it that it is <to be> a long poem, as long as Joan of Arc, designed to display all the pomp of Arabian fiction, & that I have the outline ready of a most magnificent plan. You will ask how I got the half information from Taunton. Martha Fricker heard it at Stowey from a Miss Cruikshank [7] the lady to whom the Innamorata Incognita had written, but Martha d[MS obscured] her name by the way.
I have been to Shobdon, & to Dilwyn the place where my grandmothers [8] family came from, & to Pembridge where she once lived. I think there are parts of Herefordshire & Worcestershire that would even in your eyes surpass Taunton Dean.
The Ballad which Edith has copied for you is said to have happened in the reign of Ethelwolf, [9] Alfreds father at Berkley in Glocestershire, & was certainly believed all over Europe, as I have found given as a warning to all witches in a German & a Norwegian author, xx & in the an old English Historian. [10] I like the ballad much. two others have I written since we came here, both upon true stories. [11]
from Lisbon I have received some little matter for my Letters, but neither letter nor money, at which I wonder. I know not how my Uncle thinks we all subsist. however I work very hard, & keep the wheels going.
Ediths love & Margerys & my Mothers.
God bless you.
yrs affectionately
Robert Southey.
Notes
* Address: [deletions and readdress in another hand] To/ Mr Thomas
Southey./ Royal George/ Plymouth,/ < off Ushant. >/ or
elsewhere / <to be forwarded>/ Single.
Stamped: BRISTOL
MS: British Library, Add MS
30927. (A)LS; 4p.
Unpublished. BACK
[1] ‘The Raven ... every tongue’: Verse written in double columns. Southey adds note ‘these stanzas are misplaced. the last should be first.’ BACK
[6] An early version of Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). See Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 series (London, 1849–1850), IV, pp. 181–188 for Southey’s initial plan of the poem. BACK
[7] Probably Ellen Cruikshank (dates unknown), sister of John Cruikshank (dates unknown), land agent for Lord Egmont at Nether Stowey, Somerset. A dream of John’s was the reputed inspiration for ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. Ellen herself is thought to be the ‘most gentle maid’ of Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale; A Conversational Poem, Written in April 1798’, Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (Bristol, 1798), p. 67. BACK
[9] Ethelwulf (c. 795–858, reigned 839–858; DNB), father of Alfred, the Great (849–899, reigned 871–899; DNB). BACK
[10] The German author was Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), and the story was told in his Liber Chronicorum (Nuremberg, 1493), fol. CLXXXIX; the ‘Norwegian’ was Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), Swedish ecclesiastic and writer, Historia de Gentibus Septsentrionalibus (1555), Book III, chapter 20; the ‘old English Historian’ was Matthew of Westminster, alleged author of the Flores Historiarum, the name given to a number of different manuscript chronicles of English history in Latin, from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (see C. D. Yonge, The Flowers of History, 2 vols (1853), I, pp. 400–401). BACK