Henry Crabb Robinson, No. 20 Sherrard Stt Golden Square, to the Revd Gilbert Wakefield, Dorchester Jail, 12 July 1799.  

Dear Sir

            I will not attempt to conceal that I feel myself highly flatter’d by your Letter. It was an honour I was far from anticipating. You have expressed yourself concerning me with a kindness truly characteristick and which would have afforded me the highest satisfaction if self examination would permit me to echo your flattering opinion. However this may be, and to whatever extent my future life may discredit your Judgement, I shall never cease to reflect with pleasure that I had once the good fortune to know you, and of course to be sensible of those talents and virtues which have drawn down so heavy a vengeance from their natural enemies the malignant and the weak. Perhaps I am wrong in calling the vengeance, heavy, for with whatever weight it may press upon you, your powers of resistance are not few. Contempt for your persecutors, a knowledge of the esteem in which you are held by so large a portion of the estimable, a presentiment of the station you will find in the eyes of posterity & the constant recurrence of the “self approving hour” will, I trust, enlighten the gloom of a prison and.  Your enemies may debar you from the beauties of nature & some of the charms of society; but no prison walls however high, no dangerou dungeons however deep can exclude you from the “Sunshine of the Breast” 

             Believe me with grateful esteem

                                               &c

                                                         H. C. Robinson.

No 20 Sherrard Stt Golden Square

12th July 1799. 

No address page. 

Other writing on the back page: H. Crab Robinson | to | the Revd Gilbert Wakefield | in | Dorchester Jail.  

Text: Pforz MS (S’ANA 0249), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library.