PE to visit Southey in Keswisk - CW will be in Chester for his wife's confinement and would love to see him there.
Old Westminsters
492 Catalogue Description results for Old Westminsters
Upbraids PE for not writing. Asks after his progress with Sophocles. Politics has been occupying everyone - Pitt is hostile to the current administration. CW has spoken in Parliament on the feeble conduct which has emboldened Bonaparte and caused the present war - a sentence of the speech was in Latin (quotation from Cicero?), which he presents for PE's approval. His brother Henry has been appointed His Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Dresden, at a salary of
Upbraids PE for not writing.
Asks PE to stay on his way to Scotland (and also with Southey in Keswick).
Cannot now accompany PE to Scotland, apparently because his unit of militia is going on duty early - hope that Napoleon will be so terrified by this that normal touring may be resumed within a year.
(To PE in Florence.) PE has apparently been having difficulties in getting cooperation in Naples - William (Richard) Hamilton, Sir William a Court and Lord Spencer have tried to improve this. Gossip about the recent elections. Sudden death in Oxford of wife's younger brother. The convictions of Francis Burdett and Henry Hunt (re Peterloo massacre). As laureate Southey has been writing a carmen funebre in English hexameters - he is pleased with it, but 'fortunately has some hesitation about publishing it.' Success of Scott's Ivanhoe - comments on its defects, but five different dramatisations appeared simultaneously on the London stage within six weeks of its publication. Monastery, however, which has just been published, is much inferior. Wife has just avoided a threatened miscarriage (? - has frequently miscarried before). Subscription for William Page's widow and family (OW and HM - died 20th September, 1819), though confined to OWW, has raised
Moving house - asks PE to look after his books. The cry of No Popery has succeeded even beyond the hope of those who raised it.
His wife is a fortnight overdue - has been drawing a vignette of Michael Scott's grave from the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and CW asks PE's opinion of a Latin epitaph he has composed for his wife to inscribe on the tombstone. Is learning Welsh.
Wants to ask PE's opinion of a pedagogue in Edinburgh (on behalf of a cousin).
On an election at Oxford for the Oxford MPs, involving Richards.