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.
British Library, Add MS 47891. The French version (original) is to be found in Letter 663a. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 186-189 [in French only].
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.
It is not easy for a man who does not know how to speak or write in French, to write a letter in this language without a grammar or dictionary. Oh well! he will take time to learn. and if you want to be irritated by reading letters of the greatest barbarity, here is your correspondent – you know I do not like the French language. it does not have the softness of Italian, nor the delicacy of Portuguese, nor the majesty of Spanish. French poetry is to my taste detestable – for an epigram, for a song, it is good enough. for an epic – for tragedy – holy God! what harmony. what a frightfully strange mouth is needed to pronounce it. A man of genius such as Voltaire – or the even greater Rousseau, will overcome the language. in fact in order to produce good work, a good worker is more valuable than good instruments.
You know of the arrangement that I have made with Messrs
Longman & Rees for the
works of Chatterton. my friend Rickman has drawn a view of the Church of St. Mary Redclift
The climate of my homeland is so execrable that today, in the spring, my hand shivers so much with the cold, notwithstanding I am so close to the fire that my legs are well roasted.
Believe me my friend that I <have formed> with the greatest and truest satisfaction, the hope that I will have
you for my companion during my exile in Ireland. To live in a wild land – amongst the most strange and barbarous people, without a
single friend – this prospect of the future was very terrible – Even curiosity will not last long without a companion. I have
considered a tour of Killarney. and to the North to see the famous rocks of the Giants,
Unfortunately for the science of Galvani S. Patric did not leave one of these
The final treaty
Have you read Schiller’s tragedy about Joan of Arc?
I am hoping in a little while to write passably in French – this was written without effort, with the same disregard of
the laws of grammar that the first Consul
Here I have received a letter from our good friend Danvers – to which I will reply the day after tomorrow.