1469. Richard Hengist Horne to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 105–106.
[London]
Saturday Night [23 December 1843] [1]
My dear Miss Barrett. Just rec’d your last. Any impression you derive from again looking over Milnes, I shall be glad to know when you return the enclosed. Always make any marginal comment that strikes you. But probably you will not have been much acquainted with these three writers. I only hope you will derive some amusement from hearing about them.
Very glad to know of your new Vol. This—as matter of business … You had better let me have a proof of one or two of those you consider the best of the forthcoming Vol; and not publish the Vol till after my work is out? You see, a sort of herald is sometimes a help to a new Vol—’specially of poetry. But I only suggest this. It may not in any way suit your intentions or pleasure.
The great subject—true, you are at work for yourself—therefore I ask no fresh reading—but only your impressions and opinion from what you already feel and know of the man. I mean, “Thomas Carlyle.” I hope to write a fine and full article about him, and I should like to have your hand and soul in it. This for your own soul to consider—and if the “spirit” does not move you, why do not force it.
Yes—be sure Mary Howitt will be well with us. And William also. [2] And not the Stricklands and Stickneys, and things.
You can return me the enclosed proof—with the book you mention—and a remark about Milnes any time after Tuesday; but not later than Thursday, if you please.
Yours truly
H.
P.S. I have got such [3] a paper on the stocks for Robert Montgomery. [4] Oh be secret!
Address: Miss E. B. Barrett.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Dated by Horne’s receipt of letter 1467.
2. William and Mary Howitt were the subjects of the fifth paper in A New Spirit (I, 179–198).
3. Underscored three times.
4. Horne said of Montgomery’s Woman that it was “a cargo of such unquestionable nonsense … such high pretensions of imbecility, such ungrammatical flourishes and touches of the bathetic, and such a prolonged droning sing-song, uninspired even by the abortive life of one vigorous absurdity,—a production, in fine, which must be pronounced … to be without parallel throughout the entire range of modern literature” (II, 250).
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