1434. Robert Southey to [Mary Matilda Betham], [16 March 1808]*
My dear Madam,
Unluckily I am engaged to breakfast on Friday in Upper Seymour Street, & have afterwards to reach Stockwell to an early dinner. Saturday I go to St Mary’s Cray,1 & return on Monday, – on Tuesday I will be with you at half past ten,2 – if it suit you; – if any other morning be more convenient to you, it will be equally so to me.
I am very much obliged to you for your little volume.3 It contains so much of what is really good that I hope the same powers will one day be employed upon something of greater extent.
Yours respectfully Robert Southey.
Wednesday morning.
Notes
MS: Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library,
Misc MS. 3573. ALS; 1p.
Previously published: Ernest Betham, ed., A House of Letters: Being Excerpts from the
Correspondence of Miss Charlotte Jerningham (the Honble. Lady Bedingfield),
Lady Jerningham, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey,
Bernard and Lucy Barton, and others, with Matilda Betham; and from Diaries
and Various Sources; and a Chapter upon
Landor’s Quarrel with Charles Betham at Llanthony (London, 1905), p. 104.
Dating note: written on the
Wednesday before Southey went to St Mary Cray (which he had visited and returned
from by time he wrote to Edith Southey on 22
March 1808). Back
1. A village in Kent to the southeast of London, in which Peter Elmsley lived. Back
2. To sit for his portrait in miniature. Back
3. Betham had published Poems in 1808. Back