"Keswick, April 7, 1825.
My dear Cottle,
You have indeed had a severe loss,[68] I know not how the heart could
bear, if it were not for the prospect of eternity, and the full sense of
the comparative nothingness of time, which that prospect produces. If I
look on the last thirty years, things seem as but yesterday; and when I
look forward, the end of this mortal journey must be near, though the
precise point where it will terminate is not in sight. Yet were you under
my roof, as I live in hope that one day you will be, you would recognize
just as much of the original Robert Southey as you would wish to see
remaining;--though the body is somewhat the worse for wear.
I thought I had written to thank you for your 'Strictures on the Plymouth
Antinomians;' which were well deserved, and given in a very proper
spirit. Ultra-Calvinism is as little to my liking as it is to yours. It
may be, and no doubt is held by many good men, upon whom it produces no
worse effects than that of narrowing charity. But Dr. Hawker, and such as
the Hawkers, only push it to its legitimate consequences.
At present I am engaged in a war with the Roman Catholics, a war in which
there will be much ink shed, though not on my part, for when my
'Vindiciae' are finished, I shall leave the field. When you see that
book, you will be surprised at the exposure of sophistries,
disingenuousness, and downright falsehoods, which it will lay before the
world; and you will see the charge of systematic imposture proved upon
the papal church.
I must leave my home by the middle of next month, and travel for some
weeks, in the hope of escaping an annual visitation of Catarrh, which now
always leaves cough behind it, and a rather threatening hold of the
chest. I am going therefore to Holland, to see that country, and to look
for certain ecclesiastical books, which I shall be likely to obtain at
Brussels, or Antwerp, or on the way thither.
A young friend, in the Colonial office, is to be one of my companions,
and I expect that Neville White will be the other. It is a great effort
to go from home at any time, and a great inconvenience, considering the
interruption which my pursuits must suffer; still it is a master of duty
and of economy to use every means for averting illness. If I can send
home one or two chests of books, the pleasure of receiving them on my
return is worth some cost.
How you would like to see my library, and to recognize among them some
volumes as having been the gift of Joseph Cottle, seven or eight and
twenty years ago. I have a great many thousand volumes, of all sorts,
sizes, languages, and kinds, upon all subjects, and in all sorts of
trims; from those which are displayed in 'Peacock Place,' to the ragged
inhabitants of 'Duck Row.' The room in which I am now writing contains
two thousand four hundred volumes, all in good apparel; many of them of
singular rarity and value. I have another room full, and a passage full;
book-cases in both landing places, and from six to seven hundred volumes
in my bed-room. You have never seen a more cheerful room than my study;
this workshop, from which so many works have proceeded, and in which
among other things, I have written all those papers of mine, in the
Quarterly Review, whereof you have a list below.[69]
The next month will have a paper of mine on the 'Chuch Missionary
Society,' and the one after, upon the 'Memoir of the Chevalier Bayard,'
which Sarah Coleridge, daughter of S. T. Coleridge, has translated.
Write to me oftener, as your letters will always have a reply, let whose
may go unanswered. God bless you, my dear old friend.
Yours most affectionately,