442. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 8–9.
[Hope End]
Saturday night. [24 March 1832] [1]
If I do not write tonight, I may have no means of sending a letter on Monday, & you may not hear about the preface until you hear me—which may be on Tuesday or Wednesday. This is a list of may bes, & now I come to the must bes. I am very glad to receive your letter, & to understand from it that you forgive Scholefield & me for our impertinence in reminding you of your birthday. [2] If you had been a woman, we would not have done such a thing for the world,—but you know you are not as bad as that!!—and indeed notwithstanding your dislike to birthdays, you must excuse my saying that I hope you will see a great many of them.
I have gone thro’ Wolf’s prefaces with your object in view. [3] Another time, instead of beginning at the beginning of any business, I will try how beginning at the end answers: for just at, or just before, the very last page of the very last preface, there is the remark about brackets. He says that in this business of including passages supposed spurious, within brackets, he has followed in every particular the judgment of the ancients,—and has affixed the atrocem notam [4] (quite the right expression) to no verse which has not been remarked upon, or entirely rejected by the best Greek critics.
In page 60 there is a little, but nothing that you would consider valuable, about the hiatus; and an acknowledgement of the authority of the digamma,—as “a doctissimis Britannis repertum”. [5]
If I were you, I would not mind this general reference to the judgment of the ancients, by Wolf. Aristarchus was an ancient. The system of mutilating Homer, whether it was introduced by ancients or moderns, is quite monstrous,—and cries out, like a naughty child, for a little of your flogging. When Coriolanus said that he “would rather be a dog & bay the moon,” [6] he did not mean Homer’s moon.
I will take the extracts to you, & you may read them whenever you like,—but I must say over again that I should like you not to do it, until you have quite done with every line of your own work.
Ever yours affectionately
E B Barrett.
When I had Payne Knight here, I took the trouble of counting the number of lines he has thought proper to leave out of his Homer. If I made no mistake, about 2500 lines are left out of his Iliad, and 1926, out of his Odyssey. Is not this atrox? [7]
Publication: Diary, pp. 302–303.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by reference to EBB’s gift of Scholefield’s Æschylus (1828) on Boyd’s birthday, 23 March.
2. His 51st.
3. i.e., in his edition of Homer. See letter 424, note 4.
4. “Harsh mark.”
5. “Discovered by the most learned Briton.”
6. EBB’s memory is faulty; this line was spoken by Brutus (Julius Caesar, IV, 3, 27).
7. “Horrible.” The reference is to Payne Knight’s Carmina Homerica (1808).
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