ABSTRACT
An open letter to Southey’s son, Charles Cuthbert, editor of his Life and Correspondence. Although Landor (1775–1864) and Southey were contemporaries at Oxford they did not meet until 1808, when they became close friends. In 1798 Southey had reviewed enthusiastically Landor’s Gebir, published anonymously. In a letter to Anna Seward in 1808 he referred to Gebir as ‘the only contemporary poem to which I am, as a poet, in the slightest degree indebted’ (Curry, i, p. 476). Throughout their lives the two men provided each other with considerable encouragement. Southey appears as a speaker in two of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations.
