402. Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 27 April 1799*
My dear Grosvenor
Tom & I expect to be in town together to breakfast on Tuesday morning, at the Saracens head, Friday Street, Cheapside1 Side. I will call at the Exchequer2 as near one as I can. before that time we shall have made our arrangements. Tom expects to stay in London but a few days. if Burnett will walk with me I shall eat my dinners3 & walk off. Burnett arrives in town from Yarmouth at the same time with us. if he will not ramble & you have a bed at Brixton I will buy a Dutch Grammar & study Jacob Cats.4 with my present feelings – it is almost ten o clock & I am tired hand & foot with walking & reviewing – I should look on with more satisfaction to reading & translating Dutch poetry than to wandering over the mountain sublimity of Switzerland. I want books & quietness – the less fatigue the better, & the less mental emotion. agitation is become painful.
I shall bring Madoc with me. 12 books are written out of 15.5 should I be your guest at Brixton it will be the second epic poem that I shall finish there.6 I wish to read it to you, if you can bear the almost improvisatore tone of one to whose manner of reading you are not accustomed.
Tom is recovered. I am not – & this is my ill time. however I begin to sleep well without opiates, & hope to be soon as drowsy ever as ever at the hour of owl-rising.
I want to be introduced to Pye – & for the same reason fancy he would like to be introduced to me, that we <may> talk about Alfred.7 never did I go to London with the prospect of seeing so many friends – yet never did I leave home with more reluctance. exertion, fatigue, alteration are hateful to me. my sensations are such that like certain politicians I think all changes must be needs for the worse.
Now I have no wish for the fortnights vacancy but your library every morning & you every evening. tomorrow I shall think again of my knapsack & a ramble.
Good night. yrs – huzza! as sleepily as ever Robert Southey
Saturday night. 27 Apr. 99.
Notes
Address: To/ Grosvenor Charles Bedford Esqr/ Exchequer/ London/
Single
Postmarks: [partial] BR/ AP; B/AP/ 29/ 99
Endorsement: 27 April. 1799
MS: Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. c.
23. ALS; 3p.
Unpublished. Back
1. An inn in London. Back
2. Bedford’s place of work. Back
3. Southey was still – nominally – studying law. He needed to dine at Gray’s Inn in order to fulfil the terms of his legal studies. Back
4. The Dutch statesman and poet, Jacob Cats (1577–1660). Back
5. Southey completed a fifteen-book version of Madoc in 1797-1799; the poem was heavily revised before its publication in 1805. Back
6. The first was Joan of Arc, the original draft of which was completed at the Bedfords’ home in Brixton in 1793. Back
7. The Poet Laureate Henry James Pye (1745–1813; DNB), whose Alfred, An Epic Poem in Six Books was published in 1801. Back