God bless you! Pray take care of yourself, were it only that you know how fearful and anxious your father and Fanny[190] are respecting your chest and lungs, in case of cold or over-exertion.
I have heard from Sara and from Mr. Watson (a friend of mine who has just come from the North) a very comfortable account of Hartley.
Believe me, dear Edward, with every kind wish, your affectionate uncle and sincere friend,
P. S. Your query respecting the poem I can only answer by a _Nescio_. Irving (the Scotch preacher, so blackguarded in the "John Bull" of last Sunday), certainly the greatest _orator_ I ever heard (N. B. I make and mean the same distinction between oratory and eloquence as between the mouth + the windpipe and the brain + heart), is, however, a man of great simplicity, of overflowing affections, and enthusiastically in earnest; and I have reason to believe, deeply regrets his conjunction of Southey with Byron, as far as the _men_ (and not the poems) are in question.
I mentioned to you, I believe, Basil Montagu's kind endeavour to have an associateship of the Royal Society of Literature (a yearly £100 versus a yearly essay) conferred on me. I knew nothing of the particulars till this morning, or rather till within this hour, when I received a list of names (electors) from Mr. Montagu, with advice to write to such and such and such--while he, and he, and he had promised "_for us_"--in short, a regular _canvass_, or rather sackcloth with the ashes on it pulled out of the dust holes, moistened with cabbage-water, and other culinary excretions of the same kidney. Of course, I _jibbed_ and with proper (if not equa; yet) mulanimity returned for answer--that what a man's friends did _sub rosâ_, and what one friend might say to another in favour of an individual, was one thing--what a man did in his own name and person was another--and that I would not, _could_ not, _solicit_ a single vote. I should think it an affrontive interference with a decision, in which there ought to be neither ground or motive, but the elector's own judgement, and conscience, and all for what? It is hard if, in the same time as I could produce an essay of the sort required, I could not get the same sum by compiling a school-book.