Correspondence

1181.  EBB to John Kenyon

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 12–13.

[London]

Saturday– [mid-March 1843] [1]

This Mr Horner is very noble & strong—& I like him better, my dear cousin, as a whole politician, .. as he gathers himself into one slowly with all his energy & strength. I like him better too for the magnanimous sincerity & faithfulness of his friends—that fact praising two ways.

And then what an admirable letter Sydney Smith’s is, in the appendix—quite perfect in its kind I think. [2] Thank you for all this pleasure–

Ever affectely yours

EBB

But think of his talking of “the Methodistical cant” in Roderick!– [3] He seems to have had no imagination—& no sense of the unseen–

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. This letter follows 1180, in which EBB thanks Kenyon for the loan of Horner’s Memoirs.

2. A letter from Smith to Leonard Horner, dated 26 August 1842, appears in Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, M.P. (1843, II, 434–439).

3. Horner, in a letter of 26 October 1815 to his sister, said: “I told you I was reading Don Roderick the Goth; and notwithstanding the romance of the original story, it was with fatigue that I got through it. I am not surprised that the book has had a run, because there is a romantic story, and because it is seasoned with methodistical cant to the taste of the times; but that the work should be commended by any person of cultivated taste, as it has been, seems to me strange” (op. cit., II, 269). Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths was published in 1814.

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