923. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 257–258.
[London]
Thursday. [10 March 1842] [1]
My very dear friend,
I did not know until today whether the paper wd appear on Saturday or not—but as I have now received the proof sheets, there can be no doubt of it. I have been & am hurried & hunted almost into a corner through the pressing for the fourth paper & the difficulty about books– You will forgive a very short note tonight.
I have read of Aristotle, only His poetics, his ethics & his work upon rhetoric [2] —but I mean to take him regularly into both hands when I finish Plato’s last page. Aristophanes I took with me into Devonshire—& after all, I do not know much more of him than three or four of his plays may stand for. [3] Next week, my very dear friend, I shall be at your commands, & sit in spirit at your footstool, to hear & answer anything you may care to ask me—but oh! what have I done that you shd talk to me about “venturing,” or “liberty,” or anything of that kind?
From your affectionate & grateful catechumen,
EBB.
Ah—you are not pleased about Gregory! Well but what could I have said? Surely he was not a great poet! [4] You do not think so yourself!!
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 21. Downshire Hill / Hampstead.
Publication: LEBB, I, 101–102.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. This letter is postmarked 11 March 1842, a Friday.
2. EBB’s 1780 edition of De Poetica Liber and 1803 edition of Ethicorum Nicomacheorum formed lots 351 and 352 of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A89 and A90). The latter is now at ABL.
3. In 1838, George had given EBB Brunck’s 1814–15 edition of Aristophanes’ Comœdiæ; it formed lot 343 of Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A82).
4. Although praising Gregory’s prose works, EBB had said, in the second part of her essay on the Greek poets, that “monotony of construction without unity of intention is the most wearisome of monotonies, and … we find it everywhere in Gregory” (The Athenæum, 5 March 1842, p. 211).
___________________
