1757. EBB to Benjamin Robert Haydon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 222–223.
[London]
November 14. 1844.
Of course I shall like to see a leaf from a book of Reynolds’s, my dear Mr Haydon—but I can only conceive of the interest attaching to the specific details you mention. [1] Alas! I am too ignorant!– As to Jerdan & the Greek quotation, why shd you mind? [2] The printer mistook,—and that is all. Nobody will think of it again.
The Critic shd have gone to you before now—but it has been lent to somebody. You shall have it in time & do not be uneasy, .. for, as far as my recollection extends, you were far better treated in it than I was. [3]
I did not understand anything you said as a reproach. You are always very kind to me, & I am not apt to stand in a corner & listen for occult offences. Why, what is Flush, but a lap dog? and what am I, but a woman? I assure you we never take ourselves for anything greater, .. and Flush I wd rather have less, considering how often he comes rolling over my head from the cushions behind, like an avalanche.
Ever most faithfully yours
E B Barrett.
Publication: EBB-BRH, p. 180.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “Early in 1844 Haydon was in correspondence with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s niece, Mrs. Gwatkin, who had in her possession many of his papers. Haydon proved, with her aid, that Burke had not ‘touched up’ Sir Joshua’s Discourses” (Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B.R. Haydon, 1939, ed. Martha Hale Shackford, p. 74).
2. William Jerdan (1782–1869) was the editor of The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres which concluded its otherwise positive review of Haydon’s Lectures on Painting and Design (1844) with the following criticism: “We wish Mr. Haydon had either not meddled with Greek, or that his Reader … had known something of the language; the quotation from Hippocrates in p. 33 is a mass of blunders: one may be given as a sample; for συνεπάγη, in the middle of a line, we have συν, επάγη” (2 November 1844, p. 703).
3. A review of Haydon’s Lectures on Painting and Design began in The Critic for 1 November 1844 (no. 20, pp. 159–161), the same edition in which a review of EBB’s Poems (1844) appeared, and was concluded in the 15 January 1845 edition (no. 25, pp. 297–298). Haydon’s work was also reviewed in The Athenæum of 9 November 1844 (no. 889, pp. 1025–1027).
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