Correspondence

2906.  Edward Lombe [1] to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 13–14.

V. Normanby

19th March [1851] [1]

My dear Sir

In conversation yesterday you mentioned something concerning Mr Carlyle that much struck me– That he had once hinted to you how agreeable it would have been to him if any Publisher had consented to make him an annual arrangement—leaving him free to write when the fit came on.–

I [2] am not in the Profession—but if at any time Mr Carlyle felt disposed to accept Two Hundred a year upon a similar understanding—I shall be most happy to enter into such an engagement & in such manner as he may please to dictate.–

Pray does your friend Mr Greenow on quitting Florence sell his Atelier & what does he ask for it?– It might suit me from its proximity to our small House. [3] —Horresco referens! [4] as a Coach House! but d’ont tell him that or he wd invite me to try his revolvers.

Of the scores of passages in Carlyle wh completely overpowered me was that of Mohamet as far as I remember them—“Allah has made ye to have compassion of one another:—if Allah had m[ad]e ye to have no compassion one of the other—how had it been then?[”]– The book dropped from my hands & “that night we read no more”– [5] Expand it into a volume—& you have the best & purest of Xianity. It is one of hundreds of those ingots of fine gold of wh I said—they are malleable over realms of space & of a purity to endure through countless ages of time– How had it been then? I could not get this phrase out of my head for days.– On many occasions I found my own thoughts—the scholiast says “pereat ante nos qui nostra dixisset” [6] —I said “God bless that man for having given such noble utterance to my own thoughts”——

The Eight Chapters of the Horoscope [7] I think cheap at a £1000 each—from the Class interests to whom they refer. I can fully enter into his feelings for I had already done nearly everything recommended by him to “the Landed” except play the Duke of Saxe Weimar, [8] forgive my dotage[.]

Yours very sincerely

Edward Lombe—

Robert Browning Esq–

Publication: BBIS-8, p. 49 (as ca. 1870).

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. Year provided by Lombe’s reference to Horatio Greenough’s departure from Florence.

2. Edward Lombe ( Beevor, d. 1852, aged 53), of Great Melton, Norfolk, was a progressive landowner and philanthropist. He served as M.P. for Arundel from 1826 to 1830 but retired from politics due to ill health. In the summer of 1851 he gave Harriet Martineau £500 to support her work on an abridged treatment of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Lombe died in Florence the following year on 1 March.

3. Villa Normanby was situated north of Florence between Careggi and Fiesole, less than two miles from the city center. Horatio Greenough’s studio was near the city’s northern gate at 5937 Via San Gallo. Greenough left Florence in July 1851.

4. “I shudder as I tell the tale” (Æneid, II, 204, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough). In this and subsequent quotations from, or references to, Greek and Latin classical authors, the citations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise indicated.

5. Cf. Dante, Inferno, v, 138.

6. “Bad luck to those who spoke our good thoughts before us.”

7. The title of the fourth and last book in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843).

8. Karl August of Saxe-Weimar (1757–1828), Duke (1758–1815), Grand Duke (1815–28), was a patron of Goethe and Schiller. In chapter six, “The Landed,” of Book IV in Past and Present, Carlyle holds up the Duke as an example of an active, progressive aristocrat.

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