Your Madeline is a great favourite here, and well deserves to be so. The tale is beautifully told, and everywhere true to nature; if there be a little of that ideal colouring, which belongs to this species of composition, as much as to poetry, it is in your hero rather than your heroine. The tragic catastrophe would, as you say, have made the story more perfect, but it would have made the book painful, instead of pleasing, in recollection. I am sure that I should not have looked at it a second time, compared one part with another, and dwelt upon particular scenes, if there had been death at the end; and this, I think, is not so much the weakness of my individual temper, as it is a natural feeling. The theatres shew it to be so, by the preference which is given to comedy; they who have borne a part in the tragedies of real life (who is there that can go through the world without?) shrink, even from the sorrow which is produced by fiction.
The Quarterly Review will be much better employed in recommending Madeline to notice, than in pointing out in the Pirate, beauties which everybody must have seen, and defects which nobody can have overlooked. The part which I bear in that journal is greatly overrated, and the influence which I possess there, quite as much so. For two years I have been vainly endeavouring to get a book by Sir Howard Douglas reviewed there, though the subject is of great importance, and national interest, as well as national credit, concerned in it. I could not do it myself, because it required scientific knowledge, which I do not possess.
To convince you, however, that your tale has really interested me, I will write to Mr. Gifford, and ask him to admit an article upon it; most likely he will consent; I cannot be quite sure of this, nor can I promise anything farther for the paper, than that it will be written in right good will. As for my prose—anybody’s prose is mistaken for mine; and what is far more strange, anybody’s opinions! The guessing at anonymous writings is almost as much a matter of haphazard, as the attempt to discover any person, by his walk and figure, at a masquerade.
Mrs. S. desires me to present her compliments. Remember me to William Taylor, when you happen to see him.
Farewell, my dear Madam,
And believe me yours truly,
Robert Southey.
Her next work was one of a widely different character; on “Lying, in all its branches,” a subject affording ample scope for the moralist, and handled in a manner at once novel and ingenious. It received the best of all sanctions, that of success; and she had the exquisite satisfaction of knowing that she attained the object at which she aimed. Some few years afterwards, when Mrs. Opie was at Paris, she was introduced to several American friends, who cordially greeted her, thanking her for this book, which they assured her was universally acknowledged to have done good in their country; and that it had found its way into the cottages in the interior, and might be seen there, well thumbed by frequent use. Shortly after the publication of this work, Mrs. Opie wrote thus to Mrs. Fry:—
Norwich, 12th mo., 6th, 1823.
My very dear Friend,