626. Robert Southey to Mary Barker, [mid-late November 1801]
626. Robert Southey to Mary Barker, [mid-late November 1801] *
Charlotte Smith [1] I see is better acquainted with John Bunyan [2] than with Robert Southey. that she will find out whenever we meet. [3] as for panegyric, I never praised living being yet except Mary Wollstonecraft [4] – not even Bonaparte [5] in his honest days. she I perceive still clings to France – but France has played the traitor with Liberty. – Mary Barker – it is not I who have turned round. I stand where I stood looking at the rising sun – & now the sun has set behind me! –
England has mended – is mending – will mend. I have still faith enough in God & hope enough of man. but not of France! Freedom cannot grow up in that hot bed of immorality. that oak must root in a hardier soil – England or Germany. a military despotism! – popery reestablished – the negroes again to be enslaved! [6] – Why had not the man perished before the Walls of Acre [7] in his greatness & his glory! – I was asked to write a poem upon that defeat, & half tempted to do it because it went to my very heart –
I wish we could offer you a bed – lodgings cramp one sadly. Ediths love. – we are eager to see you –
yrs
R Southey.
Notes
* Address:
To/ Miss Barker.
MS: MS untraced; text is taken from
Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick Jnr, ‘The Letters of Robert
Southey to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (unpublished
PhD, Harvard, 1967), pp. 20-21 [where it is dated
December 1801]
Previously published: John Wood
Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of
Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I,
pp. 180–181.
Dating note: Miss Barker had visited
Southey in London and left by 3 December 1801 (Southey
to Danvers 2-3 December 1801, Letter 634). This letter
was written in reply to a letter of Mary Barker’s and in
expectation of her visit. A date of mid-late November
1801 can therefore be suggested for this
letter. BACK
[1] Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806; DNB), poet and novelist; author, among many other works, of Celestina (1791) and The Old Manor House (1793). BACK
[3] Mary Barker was an old friend of Charlotte Smith; they spent the winter together in London in 1801-1802. BACK
