of one thing at a time. For instance, if Poole is intent on his matter while he is speaking, he cannot give the least attention to his language or pronunciation, in consequence of which there is no one error in his dialect which he has ever got rid of. My mind is in general of the contrary make. I too often do nothing, in consequence of being impressed all at once (or so rapidly consecutively as to appear all at once) by a variety of impressions. If there are a dozen people at table I hear, and cannot help giving some attention to what each one says, even though there should be three or four talking at once. The detail of the Good and the Bad, of the two different makes of mind, would form a not uninteresting brace of essays in a Spectator or Guardian.
You will of course repay Southey instantly all the money you may have borrowed either for yourself or for Mr. Jackson,[15] and do not forget to remember that a share of the wine-bill belonged to me. Likewise when you pay Mr. Jackson, you will pay him just as if he had not had any money from you. Is it half a year? or a year and a half’s rent that we owe him? Did we pay him up to July last? If we did, then, were I you, I would now pay him the whole year’s rent up to July next, and tell him that you shall not want the twenty pounds which you have lent him till the beginning of May. Remember me to him in the most affectionate manner, and say how sincerely I condole with him on his sprain. Likewise, and as affectionately, remember me to Mrs. Wilson.
It gave me pain and a feeling of anxious concern on our own account, as well as Mr. Jackson’s, to find him so distressed for money. I fear that he will be soon induced to sell the house.
Now for our darling Hartley. I am myself not at all anxious or uneasy respecting his habits of idleness; but I should be very unhappy if he were to go to the town school, unless there were any steady lad that Mr. Jackson knew and could rely on, who went to the same school regularly, and who would be easily induced by half-a-crown once in two or three months to take care of him, let him always sit by him, and to whom you should instruct the child to yield a certain degree of obedience. If this can be done (and you will read what I say to Mr. Jackson), I have no great objection to his going to school and making a fair trial of it. Oh, may God vouchsafe me health that he may go to school to his own father! I exceedingly wish that there were any one in Keswick who would give him a little instruction in the elements of drawing. I will go to-morrow and enquire for some very elementary book, if there be any, that proposes to teach it without the assistance of a drawing master, and which you might make him read to you instead of his other books. Sir G. Beaumont was very much pleased and interested by Hartley’s promise of attachment to his darling Art. If I can find the book I will send it off instantly, together with the Spillĕkins (Spielchen, or Gamelet, I suppose), a German refinement of our Jack Straw. You or some one of your sisters will be so good as to play with Hartley, at first, that Derwent may learn it. Little Albert at Dr. Crompton’s, and indeed all the children, are quite spillekin mad. It is certainly an excellent game to teach children steadiness of hand and quickness of eye, and a good opportunity to impress upon them the beauty of strict truth, when it is against their own interest, and to give them a pride in it, and habits of it,—for the slightest perceptible motion produced in any of the spillekins, except the one attempted to be crooked off the heap, destroys that turn, and there is a good deal of foresight executed in knowing when to give it a lusty pull, so as to move the spillekins under, if only you see that your adversary who will take advantage of this pull, will himself not succeed, and yet by his or the second pull put the spillekin easily in the power of the third pull.... I am now writing in No. 44 Upper Titchfield Street, where I have for the first time been breakfasting with A. Welles, who seems a kind, friendly man, and instead of recommending any more of his medicine to me, advises me to persevere in and expedite my voyage to a better climate, and has been very pressing with me to take up my home at his house. To-morrow I dine with Mr. Rickman at his own house; Wednesday I dine with him at Tobin’s. I shall dine with Mr. Welles to-day, and thence by eight o’clock to the Royal Institution to the lecture.[16] On Thursday afternoon, two o’clock to the lecture, and Saturday night, eight o’clock to the lecture. On Friday, I spend the day with Davy certainly, and I hope with Mr. Sotheby likewise. To-morrow or Wednesday I expect to know certainly what my plans are to be, whither to go and when, and whether the intervening space will make it worth my while to go to Ottery, or whether I shall go back to Dunmow, and return with Sir George and Lady B. when they come to their house in Grosvenor Square. I cannot express to you how very, very affectionate the behaviour of these good people has been to me; and how they seem to love by anticipation those very few whom I love. If Southey would but permit me to copy that divine passage of his “Madoc,”[17] respecting the Harp of the Welsh Bard, and its imagined divinity, with the Two Savages, or any other detachable passage, or to transcribe his “Kehama,” I will pledge myself that Sir George Beaumont and Lady B. will never suffer a single individual to hear or see a single line, you saying that it is to be kept sacred to them, and not to be seen by any one else.
[No signature.]
CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Rickman’s Office, H. of Commons,
February 20, 1804, Monday noon.
Dear Southey,—The affair with Godwin began thus. We were talking of reviews, and bewailing their ill effects. I detailed my plan for a review, to occupy regularly the fourth side of an evening paper, etc., etc., adding that it had been a favourite scheme with me for two years past. Godwin very coolly observed that it was a plan which “no man who had a spark of honest pride” could join with. “No man, not the slave of the grossest egotism, could unite in,” etc. Cool and civil! I asked whether he and most others did not already do what I proposed in prefaces. “Aye! in prefaces; that is quite a different thing.” I then adverted to the extreme rudeness of the speech with regard to myself, and added that it was not only a very rough, but likewise a very mistaken opinion, for I was nearly if not quite sure that it had received the approbation both of you and of Wordsworth. “Yes, sir! just so! of Mr. Southey—just what I said,” and so on mōrĕ Godwiniāno in language so ridiculously and exclusively appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become double-refined in octavo foolscap or pickpocket quartos, blind slavish egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer, modest as maiden’s blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone, tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick,[18] and four young ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was Truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!... Yet he did not absolutely give way till that stinging contrast which I drew between him as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much
