I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position.  As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority.  In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors—­a large number of our governors, and almost all of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, viz. our committee governors, were such—­and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ’s Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence—­just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us—­’Coleridge! here’s your friends want you—­they are quite grand,’ or ’It is quite a lady’—­when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions.  And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner’s whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;—­and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay.  To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.

God bless you and yours.

ROBERT SOUTHEY

1774-1843

TO JOSEPH COTTLE

Question of copyrights

Greta Hall, 20 April, 1808.

My dear Cottle,...

What you say of my copyrights affected me very much.  Dear Cottle, set your heart at rest on that subject.  It ought to be at rest.  These were yours, fairly bought, and fairly sold.  You bought them on the chance of their success, which no London bookseller would have done; and had they not been bought, they could not have been published at all.  Nay, if you had not purchased Joan of Arc, the poem never would have existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power which enables me to support it.