a state of feeling deeper than may be serviceable to me) when gulielmosartorially speaking (
i. e. William “Taylorice”) the latter word shall have become an incurable synonym, a lumberly duplicate, thrown into the kennel of the Lethe-lapping Chronos Anubioeides,
[26] as a carriony, bare-ribbed tautology. Oh me! it will not do! You, my children, the Wordsworths, are at Keswick and Grasmere, and I am at Malta, and it is a silly hypocrisy to pretend to joke when I am heavy at heart. By the accident of the sale of a dead Colonel’s effects, who arrived in this healing climate too late to be healed, I procured the perusal of the second volume of the “Annual Review.” I was suddenly and strangely affected by the marked attention which you had paid to my few hints, by the insertion of my joke on Booker; but more, far more than all, by the affection for me which peeped forth in that “William Brown of Ottery.” I knew you stopped before and after you had written the words. But I am to speak of your reviews in general. I am confident, for I have carefully reperused almost the whole volume, and what I knew or detected to be yours I have read over and over again, with as much care and as little warping of partiality as if it had been a manuscript of my own going to the press—I can say confidently that in my best judgment they are models of good sense and correct style; of high and honest feeling intermingled with a sort of wit which (I now translate as truly, though not as verbally, as I can, the sense of an observation which a literary Venetian, who resides here as the editor of a political journal, made to me after having read your reviews of Clarke’s “Maritime Discoveries”) unites that happy
turn of words, which is the essence of French wit, with those comic picture-making combinations of fancy that characterises the old wit of old England. If I can find time to copy off what in the hurry of the moment I wrote on loose papers that cannot be made up into a letter without subjecting you to an expense wholly disproportionate to their value, I shall prove to you that I have been watchful in marking what appeared to me false, or
better-not, or
better-otherwise, parts, no less than what I felt to be excellent. It is enough to say at present, that seldom in my course of reading have I been more deeply impressed than by the sense of the diffused good they were likely to effect. At the same time I could not help feeling to how many false and pernicious principles, both in taste and in politics, they were likely, by their excellence, to give a non-natural circulation. W. Taylor grows worse and worse. As to his political dogmata concerning Egypt, etc., God forgive him! He knows not what he does! But as to his spawn about Milton and Tasso—nay, Heaven forbid it should be
spawn, it is pure toad-spit, not as toad-spit is, but as it is vulgarly believed to be. (
See, too, his Article in the “Critical Review.”) Now for your feelings respecting “Madoc.” I regard them as all nerve and stomach-work, you having too recently quitted the business. Genius, too, has its intoxication, which, however divine, leaves its headaches and its nauseas. Of the very best of the few bad, good, and indifferent things, I have had the same sensations. Concerning the immediate chryso-poetic powers of “Madoc” I can only fear somewhat and hope somewhat. Midas and Apollo are as little cronies as Marsyas and Apollo. But of its great and lasting effects on your fame, if I doubted, I should then doubt all things in which I had hitherto had firm faith. Neither am I without cheerful belief respecting its
ultimate effects on your worldly fortune. O dear Southey! when I see this booby with his ten pound a day as Mr. Commissary X., and
that thorough-rogue two doors off him with his fifteen pound a day as Mr. General Paymaster Y. Z., it stirs up a little bile from the liver and gives my poor stomach a pinch, when I hear you talk of having to look forward to an £100 or £150. But cheerily! what do we complain of? would we be either of these men? Oh, had I domestic happiness, and an assurance only of the health I now possess continuing to me in England, what a blessed creature should I be, though I found it necessary to feed me and mine on roast potatoes for two days in each week in order to make ends meet, and to awake my beloved with a kiss on the first of every January. “Well, my best darling! we owe nobody a farthing! and I have you, my children, two or three friends, and a thousand books!” I have written very lately to Mrs. Coleridge. If my letter reaches her, as I have quoted in it a part of yours of Oct. 19th, she will wonder that I took no notice of the house and the
Bellygerent. From Mrs. C. I have received no letter by the last convoy. In truth I am and have reason to be ashamed to own to what a diseased excess my sensibility has worsened into. I was so agitated by the receipt of letters, that I did not bring myself to open them for two or three days, half-dreaming that from there being no letter from Mrs. C. some one of the children had died, or that she herself had been ill, or—for so help me God! most ill-starred as our marriage has been, there is perhaps nothing that would so frightfully affect me as any change respecting her health or life; and, when I had read about a third of your letter, I walked up and down and then out, and much business intervening, I wrote to her before I had read the remainder, or my other letters. I grieve exceedingly at the event, and my having foreseen it does not diminish the shock. My dear study! and that house in which such persons have been! where my Hartley has made his first love-commune with Nature, to belong to White. Oh, how could Mr. Jackson have the heart to do it! As to the climate, I am fully convinced that to an invalid all parts of England are so much alike, that no disadvantages on that score can overbalance any marked advantages from other causes. Mr. J. well knows that but for my absolute confidence in him I should have taken the house for a long lease—but, poor man! I am rather to soothe than to reproach him. When will he ever again have loving friends and housemates like to us? And dear good Mrs. Wilson! Surely Mrs. Coleridge must have written to me, though no letter has arrived. Now for myself. I am most anxiously expecting the arrival of Mr. Chapman from Smyrna, who is (by the last ministry if that should hold valid) appointed successor to Mr. Macaulay, as Public Secretary of Malta, the second in rank to the Governor. Mr. M., an old man of eighty, died on the 18th of last month, calm as a sleeping baby, in a tremendous thunder-and-lightning storm. In the interim, I am and some fifty times a day subscribe myself,
Segretario Pubblico dell’ Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze. I live in a perfect palace and have all my meals with the Governor; but my profits will be much less than if I had employed my time and efforts in my own literary pursuits. However, I gain new insights and if (as I doubt not I shall) I return having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts as well as interim expense (of the which debts I consider the £100 borrowed by me from Sotheby on the firm of W. Wordsworth, the heaviest), with health, and some additional knowledge both in things and languages, I surely shall not have lost a year. My intention is, assuredly, to leave this place at the farthest in the latter end of this month, whether by the convoy, or over-land by Trieste, Vienna, Berlin, Embden, and Denmark, but I must be guided by circumstances. At all events, it will be well if a letter should be left for me at the “Courier” office in London, by the first of May, informing me of all which it is necessary for me to know. But of one thing I am most anxious, namely, that my assurance money should be paid. I pray you, look to that. You will have heard long before this letter reaches you that the French fleet have escaped from Toulon. I have no heart for politics, else I could tell you how for the last nine months I have been working in memorials concerning Egypt, Sicily, and the coast of Africa. Could France ever possess these, she would be, in a far grander sense than the Roman, an Empire of the World. And what would remain to England? England; and that which our miserable diplomatists affect now to despise, now to consider as a misfortune, our language and institutions in America. France is blest by nature, for in possessing Africa she would have a magnificent outlet for her population as near her own coasts as Ireland to ours; an America that must forever be an integral part of the mother-country. Egypt is eager for France—only eager, far more eager for G. Britain. The universal cry there (I have seen translations of twenty, at least, mercantile letters in the Court of Admiralty here (in which I have made a speech with a wig and gown, a true Jack of all Trades), all stating that the
vox populi) is English, English, if we can! but
Hats at all events! (Hats means Europeans in contradistinction to Turbans.) God bless you, Southey! I wish earnestly to kiss your child. And all whom you love, I love, as far as I can, for your sake.
For England. Per Inghilterra.
Robert Southey, Esqre, Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland.
CLVI. TO DANIEL STUART.
Favoured by Captain Maxwell of the Artillery.—N. B., an amiable mild man, who is prepared to give you any information.
Malta, April 20, 1805.
Dear
