1295. Benjamin Robert Haydon to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 200.

London

June 22 1843

I forgot to tell you, I never published these notices of Leigh Hunt– I meant to have done it, but remembering I could only have acquired my knowledge by intimacy I considered it dishonorable– They have remained ever since in my drawer—& by accident I found them—return them to me, as soon as Convenient & When I send Byron let me have Wilkie–

I have been hard at Alexander all day—— Adieu–

B R Haydon

Miss B B——

Lord Morpeth made a very fine Speech yesterday at the Anti-Slavery meeting—— [1]

Address: Miss B. Barrett / 50, Wimpole St.

Publication: EBB-BRH, p. 118.

Manuscript: University of Vermont.

1. George William Frederick Howard, Lord Morpeth (1802–64), later (1848) 7th Earl of Carlisle, became a member of Parliament in 1826, voting for parliamentary reform and the relief of Catholic and Jewish civil disabilities. On 21 June he took the chair at a meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery League at Exeter Hall. He recounted Miss Martineau’s being told by the captain of a steamer plying the river Niagara “that the finest sight in the world was the leap of the fugitive slave to the shore when the ship neared the British territory.” [Turning to several American gentlemen on the platform], “Now I address myself to you, the citizens of the United States; could reams of arguments, or torrents of declamation, put more visibly or vividly before you the whole gist of this great subject? How long will you let it be so?” (See The Times of 22 June for a full report of his speech.)

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