701. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 168–169.

Torquay.

Monday. [Postmark: 24 June 1839]

My dear friend,

I take the liberty, which I know you will not be angry about, of enclosing to you a letter of private gossip for my dear Arabel. Will you be so or my dear Arabel. Will you be so very kind as to enclose it to her as soon as you conveniently can. Perhaps you would allow a servant to take it to her in the course of the day.

You wrote me a kind & welcome letter to which I mean to reply very soon—more at length than I can this morning, being quite tired with writing. Finden’s Tableaux are to be edited again this year by Miss Mitford, and she has sent to me for a ballad,—& I have begun already a wild and wicked ballad. [1] There are so many monks & nuns in the engraving forwarded for me to fit my poetry to it, (think of the very annuals turning papistical!) that I am thinking of introducing you as a St John’s Wood Bard versus Gray’s “Welsh judges,” [2] taking a grand prophetic view of the Pope’s dynasty which is to be in our O’Connellized country.

My dear Mr Boyd, believe me

truly & ever affectionately yours

E B Barrett.

I am better.

Address, on integral page: H S Boyd Esqr / 3 Circus Road / St John’s Wood / London.

Publication: EBB-HSB, p. 234.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. “The Legend of the Browne Rosarie.”

2. A reference to The Bard (1757), in which Gray tells of Welsh bards put to death by Edward I.

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