536. Robert Southey to Mary Barker, 8 July [1800]*
I write a few lines by you. so few that only the opportunity of a private hand could excuse them.
You will find at Congreve a copy of Joan of Arc1 which will arrive as soon as you can do. It will be an earlier remembrancer than the Packet could bring you. &, when you see Thalaba, it will serve like a bad drawing – to show improvement.2 I am not however ashamed of it.
If you go thro Plymouth & the fleet be there I have a brother on board the Bellona who will show you what is to be seen. Lieutenant Thomas Southey: he is better than the breed of Sailors in general. only send to him in my name, & he will have brains enough in two minutes to see that you are not a mere Lisbon acquaintance.
God bless you. I love Cintra dearly – but I would rather the rock3 went to England than you.
R.S.
Tuesday July 8.
Do not fail – or delay – to inform us of your arrival. I will watch all the seeding flowers – & send you my Wall & the Cork Tree4 in most accurate painting.
[The first letter I ever received from dear Southey MSlade
nee Barker]5
Notes
Address: To/Miss Barker
[Bath]
MS: MS untraced; text is taken from Robert
Galloway Kirkpatrick Jnr, ‘The Letters of Robert Southey
to Mary Barker From 1800 to 1826’ (unpublished PhD,
Harvard, 1967), pp. 1–2
Previously published: H.
Spencer Scott, ‘Some Southey Letters’, Atlantic
Monthly, 89 (1902), 36 [in
part]. Back
1. Southey had sent a copy of Joan of Arc (1798) to Mary Barker’s home at Congreve, Staffordshire. Back
2. The Islamic romance Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). Back
3. The Sierra, or mountain of Cintra. Back
4. Mary Barker was an amateur painter and may have been teaching Southey to paint. Back
5. The first … Barker: Marginal annotation in hand of Mary Barker; as Mary Barker signs herself ‘Slade’, this was written after her marriage in 1830. Back