921. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 256.
[London]
Saturday night. March 5– 1842.
My very dear friend,
I am quite angry with myself for forgetting your questions when I answered your letter.
Could you really imagine that I have not looked into the Greek tragedians for years, with my true love for Greek poetry? That is asking a question you will say—& not answering it. Well then, I answer by a ‘Yes’ the one you put to me. I had two volumes of Euripides with me in Devonshire—& have read him as well as Æschylus and Sophocles,—that is from them––both before & since I went there. You know I have gone through every line of the three tragedians, long ago, in the way of regular, consecutive reading. [1]
You know also that I had at different times read different dialogues of Plato: but when three years ago, & a few months previous to my leaving home, I became possessed of a complete edition of his works edited by Bekker, [2] why then I began with the first volume & went through the whole of his writings, both those I knew & those I did not know, one after another,—& have at this time read, not only all that is properly attributed to Plato, but even those dialogues & epistles which pass falsely under his name,—everything except two books I think, or three, of that treatise “De legibus” which I shall finish in a week or two—as soon as I can take breath from Mr Dilke. [3]
Now, the questions are answered.
Ever your affectionate & grateful friend
EBB.
Address: H S Boyd Esqr
Publication: LEBB, I, 101.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. As far back as 1832, EBB had written “I have now read every play of Æschylus Sophocles & Euripides” (Diary, p. 229).
2. August Immanuel Bekker (1785–1871), German philologist and critic, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin (1810), was a prolific editor of the classical authors. EBB’s copy of his 11-volume, 1826 edition of Plato’s works, now at Ohio Wesleyan, sold as lot 989 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1861).
3. i.e., her on-going series of papers on the Greek Christian Poets.
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