"Would that 'Roderick' were in your hands for
reviewing; I should desire no fairer nor more competent
critic. But it is of little consequence what friends or
enemies may do for it now; it will find its due place
in time, which is slow but sure in its decisions. From
the nature of my studies, I may almost be said to live
in the past; it is to the future that I look for my
reward, and it would be difficult to make any person
who is not thoroughly intimate with me, understand how
completely indifferent I am to the praise or censure of
the present generation, farther than as it may affect
my means of subsistence, which, thank God, it can no
longer essentially do. There was a time when I was
materially injured by unjust criticism; but even then I
despised it, from a confidence in myself, and a natural
buoyancy of spirit. It cannot injure me now, but I
cannot hold it in more thorough contempt.

"Come and visit me when the warm weather returns. You
can go nowhere that you will be more sincerely
welcomed. And may God bless you.

"Robert Southey."

In waging war with the Lake school of poetry, the _Edinburgh Review_ had
dealt harshly with Southey. His poems of "Madoc" and "The Curse of
Kehama" had been rigorously censured, and very shortly before the
appearance of "Roderick," his "Triumphal Ode" for 1814, which was
published separately, had been assailed with a continuance of the same