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THE

LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE

OF

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

EDITED BY HIS SON, THE

REV. CHARLES CUTHBERT SOUTHEY, M.A.

CURATE OF PLUMBLAND, CUMBERLAND.

Second Edition.

IN SIX VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS,

PATERNOSTER-ROW.

PREFACE.

PR

5466 A6

1849

FOR the delay which has taken place in bringing forth this Work I am not responsible, as it has chiefly arisen from the circumstance that no literary executor was expressly named in my father's latest will; and in consequence of the difficulties which thus arose, it was not until the spring of 1848 that the materials, as far as they had then been collected, were put into my hands. I have since then made what speed I might in the preparation of them for the press, amid the engagements of other business, and with my hand often palsied by causes over which I had no control.

It were useless to endeavour to refute the various objections often made to a son's undertaking such a task; yet one remark may be permitted, that although a son may not be a fit person to pass judgment upon a father's character, he yet may faithfully chronicle his life; and is undoubtedly, by a natural right, the most proper person to have all private letters submitted to his eye, and all family affairs intrusted to his judgment.

With this feeling, and with the full conviction that I am acting in accordance with what would have been my father's own wish, I have not thought it right to shrink from an undertaking, for which I cannot claim to have in other respects any peculiar qualifications. Accordingly, my object has been, not to compose a regular biography, but rather to lay before the reader such a selection from my father's letters, as will give, in his own words, the history of his life; and I have only added such remarks as I judged necessary for connection or explanation; indeed the even tenor of his life, during its greater portion, affords but little matter for pure biography, and the course of his literary pursuits, his opinions on passing events, and the few incidents of his own career, will all be found narrated by himself in a much more natural manner than if his letters had been worked up into a regular narrative.

My father has long been before the public, and has obtained a large share of praise, as well as of censure and misrepresentation; he has yet, however, to be fully known; and this I have a good hope will be accomplished by the publication of these volumes ;that in them all his mind will appear; in its playfulness as well as its gravity, in its joys and its sorrows, and the gradual progress of his opinions be fairly traced, from the visionary views of his early youth, up to the fixed and settled convictions of his riper years; and if I have inserted any letters, or passages, which re

late principally to his domestic life, and the affairs of the family circle, it has been with the conviction that he himself would not have wished them to be excluded, and that, although without them the events of his life might have been recorded, these would have formed only the outlines of the picture, which would have wanted all those finer touches that give to human nature its chief interest and its highest beauty.

I must now make my acknowledgements generally to those friends and correspondents of my father who have most kindly placed their letters at my disposal. And in particular to Mrs. Henry Bedford for those addressed to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, Esq., from which I have drawn my chief materials for this volume and which I have used largely throughout the work; to William Rickman, Esq., for those addressed to his father, the late John Rickman, Esq.; to the Right Hon. Charles W. W. Wynn; to John May, Esq.; to J. G. Lockhart, Esq., for those addressed to Sir Walter Scott; to Joseph Cottle, Esq.; to Mrs. Neville White and the Rev. James White; to the family of the late Sharon Turner, Esq.; to Walter Savage Landor, Esq.; to the family of the late Dr. Gooch; to the family of the late Rev. Nicholas Lightfoot; to Mr. Ebenezer Elliott; to Mr. Ticknor, of Boston; to Miss Elizabeth Charter; to Mrs. Hodson; to John Kenyon, Esq.; to Mrs. H. N. Coleridge; to William Wordsworth, Esq., Poet Laureat; and to Henry Taylor, Esq.

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