415. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 5 June 1799

415. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 5 June 1799 *
Wednesday June 5. 99.
My dear Grosvenor
Heer is de koele June. [1] we have a March wind howling & a March fire burning. it is a diabolus diei. [2]
My journey was like the new method of cutting for the stone, memorized in my Letters. [3] but I learnt one piece of information which you may profit by – that on Sunday nights they put the new horses into the Mail always – because as they carry no letters, an accident is of less consequence as to the delay it occasions. this nearly broke our necks for we narrowly escaped an overturn. so I travel no more on a Sunday night in the Mail.
I found Edith better – but my Mother is very unwell, so as to give me serious apprehensions.
Carlisle came Saturday afternoon & went away Sunday. he brought with him such trout! tell Horace such trout!
I am the better for my journey, & inclined to attribute it to the greater quantity of wine I drank at Brixton than I had previously done. therefore I have supplied the æther by the grape-juice – & exchanged the table-spoon for the corkscrew.
I find Printers faith as bad as Punic faith. [4] new types have been promised from London for some weeks & are not yet arrived – therefore I am still out of the press. I pray you forget not to send me the old man woman who was circularized
[Southey inserts sketch of a large O]
who saw her own back, whose head was like the title page of a Jews prayer book, who was an emblem of eternity, the Omikron of old women. [5] you will make a good ballad of this quaint tale. it is for subjects allied to humour or oddity that you possess most powers. witness the Barbers [6] & Pretty Grange. [7] find such subjects & you will find pleasure in writing in proportion as you feel your own strength. I will at my first leisure transcribe for you St Anthony & the Devil. [8]
The time of removal is so near at hand that I begin to wish every thing were settled & over. this is a place which I leave with some reluctance, after taking root here for 25 years, & now our society is so infinitely mended. Davy, the Pneumatic Institution [9] Experimentalist is a first rate man, conversible on all subjects & learnable-from, (which by the by is as fine a Germanly compounded word as you may expect to see. I am going to breathe some wonder-working gas [10] which excites all possible mental & muscular energy & induces almost a delirium of pleasurable sensations without any subsequent dejection.
We had a rare tempest yesterday in honour of his Majestys birth day, [11] & I thought of you & your Horse & the Grand Review. I will get the Fox Glove receipt for you, which I forgot to ask for when last I saw Davy. remember me with all thankfulness for three weeks hospitality to your father & mother. – & to your brothers both. Snivel [12] is not susceptible of a compliment or I would not forget her because she did not forget me.
I was fortunate enough to meet Sharpe of whom you said so much on the Sunday that I left Brixton. I was with Johnson in the Kings Bench [13] when he came in; I mist his name as he entered but was quite surprized at the novelty & good sense of all his remarks. he talked on many subjects, & on all with a strength & justness of thought which I have seldom seen found. this meeting pleased me much – & I wish much to see more of Sharpe. he seems a man whom it would be impossible not to profit by. he talked of Combe [14] – who is in the Kings Bench. you said that Combe wrote books which were not known to be his. [15] Sharpe mentioned as his – Lord Lyttletons Letters. [16] many of Sternes Letters. [17] & Æneas Andersons account of China. [18]
God bless you.
yrs affectionately
Robert Southey
Notes
* Address: To/ G. C. Bedford Esqr/ Exchequer / London
Postmarks: BRISTOL/ JUN 5 99; B/ JU/ 6/ 99
Endorsement: 5. June 1799
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c.
23. ALS; 4p.
Previously published: Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 6 vols
(London, 1849–1850), II, pp. 18–20 [in part]. BACK
[3] Robert Southey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, 2nd edn (Bristol, 1799), p. 203. BACK
[5] The fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, equivalent to the English ‘o’. Bedford had written a ballad about an old woman, ‘The Hag’s Disaster’; see Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 14 October [1799], Letter 446. BACK
[6] Bedford’s ‘The Rhedycinian Barbers’, published in Southey’s Annual Anthology (Bristol, 1799), pp. 44–47. BACK
[7] For Southey and Bedford’s co-authored ‘Pretty pipe, and pretty grange’, see their letter to Charles Collins, 16 September 1793, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part 1, Letter 56. BACK
[8] Southey’s eclogue ‘The Devil and St. Anthony’; see Robert Southey to William Taylor, 18 March 1799, Letter 391. BACK
[9] The Pneumatic Institute, Dowry Square, Bristol, had opened earlier in 1799. It was devoted to using gases to treat illness. Humphry Davy was Thomas Beddoes’s deputy at the Institute. BACK
[10] Nitrous oxide. The effects of the gas on Southey were described in Thomas Beddoes, Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (Bristol, 1799), p. 11; and Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration (London, 1800), pp. 507–509. BACK
[13] Joseph Johnson (1738–1809; DNB) had been sentenced in February 1799 to six months incarceration in the Kings Bench prison for publishing Gilbert Wakefield’s A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (1798). BACK
[14] The writer William Combe (1742–1823; DNB) had been arrested and imprisoned for debt in May 1799. BACK