Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Houghton Library, bMS Eng 265.1 (33) . Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey’s spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I am selfish enough to be sorry at your preference of travelling to Oxford — & whilst I commend your choice must
lament it — to see the manners of different countries is certainly of the utmost utility & what no university can teach — Homer may
tell us of the method to cut up an ox three thousand years ago, or give a specimen of Penelopes politesses when she calls her maid
bitch — or Ulysses decency when he threatens to leave Thersites in the situation of the man who cut off his hairs
The bloody proceedingso than poor Barnes probosis! all that
surprizes me besides this of Combe is that the fellow did not murder Purcel
I left my deal box full of books — among which were the history of Turkey with those rum figures
I heard some days ago from your grandfather,to sent by the bolt in Tun coach & on the direction was wrote to
be forwarded by the Rye coach from the bolt in Tun Fleet Street with the day of the month will you mention in your next if you have
heard of their arrival — for though is no name to the letter it would not be agreabell to lose them on the road.
I have now two commissions to beg you will execute but both are very soon done — the first is to thump Collins well for never answering my last & if you join his Majesty with you in the execution of it so much the better — the other is to see Scaliger
alias Old Donkey alias Mr Grosvenor Bedford [MS torn] request he will
write & inclose the portrait of Peter the Ph[MS torn] all his “head of charms”mmer