894. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 201–202.
50 Wimpole Street
Jany. 6th 1842.
My dear friend,
I have done your bidding & sent the translations to the Athenæum, attaching to them an infamous prefatory note which says all sorts of harm of Gregory’s poetry. [1] You will be very angry with it & me.
And you may be angry for another reason—that in the midst of my true thankfulness for the emendations you sent me, I ventured to reject one or two of them. You are right probably, & I wrong—but still, I thought within myself, with a womanly obstinacy not altogether peculiar to me, .. “If he & I were to talk together about them, he wd kindly give up the point to me .. so that, now we cannot talk together,––I might as well take it.” Well—you will see what I have done. Try not to be angry with me. You shall have the Athenæum as soon as possible.
My dear Mr. Boyd .. you know how I disbelieved the probability of these papers’ being accepted. You will comprehend my surprise on receiving last night a very courteous note from the editor, [2] which I wd send to you if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading from the pyramids. He wishes me to contribute to the Athenæum some prose papers in the form of reviews—“the review being a mere form, & the book a mere text.” He is not very clear .. but I fancy that a few translations of excerpta, with a prose analysis & synthesis of the original author’s genius, might suit his purpose. Now suppose I took up some of the early Christian Greek poets, & wrote a few continuous papers so? [3] Give me your advice, my dear friend! I think of Synesius for one. Suppose you send me a list of the names which occur to you! Will you advise me? Will you write directly? Will you make allowance for my teazing you? Will you lend me your little Synesius [4] —and Clarke’s book? [5] I mean the one commenced by Dr Clarke & continued by his son. Above all things, however, I want the advice.
Ever affectely yours.
EBB
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 21. Downshire Hill / Hampstead.
Publication: LEBB, I, 95–96.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB’s translation of three of Gregory Nazianzen’s hymns appeared in The Athenæum of 8 January 1842 (no. 741, pp. 39–40). Her “prefatory note” included the statement that “There are poetical writers who are not poets … Of such is Gregory. He is an ORATOR;—less wordy and monotonous than Chrysostom, but more laborious and antithetical … He can build anything lofty, except a ‘rhyme’.”
2. i.e., Charles Wentworth Dilke.
3. The outcome was “Some Account of the Greek Christian Poets,” published in four issues of The Athenæum, commencing with that of 26 February 1842.
4. EBB probably refers to the edition by Franciscus Portus that she had borrowed earlier (see letter 446).
5. A Concise View of the Succession of Sacred Literature (1830–32). Commenced by Boyd’s friend, Adam Clarke, who died in 1832, the work was completed by his son, Joseph Butterworth Bulmer Clarke.
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