1508. Richard Hengist Horne to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 169–170.
[London]
Wednesday [Postmark: 24 January 1844]
My dear Miss Barrett, I rec’d your m∙s. on Carlyle in due course, [1] and was very glad to get it, as it will be one to ‘start me’ upon some new trains, besides all it carries in its own. I have not yet read it; but shall come to it soon now, in its turn.
I am glad you wrote the kind of note you did to Mr Merry, [2] who has quoted it to Mr Reade, who has written to me—me, the intermediatorial sufferer—and in raptures. All is now quite a different story. And with you both. It was an edifying subject (as it is an ‘old story’) to see me, in a trice, “as I appeared” after making an effort to stop all these sayings of which I was the recipient. But, lo, and behold! in the twinkling of an eye, [3] you turn into a special pleader for Mr Reade against me; and he torments me with new declarations. This last, however, shows me that all has gone well—nothing could be better. He compares you, by virtue of your note, or whatever may have been quoted from it, to Lady Jane Grey in corresponding with Cecil or Roger Ascham. [4] Good. I am content.
You see, I knew what I knew—I had many notes from Mr Reade, fraught with prejudice– I know that tho’ talking so much of solitude and retirement &c he goes much into society, especially literary—and talks considerably. And so– I would have sent you some of his notes, and have told him that I had done so—but then matters would not have ended so well as they have.
And what was it to me, as it stood at first? Much. No experience ever cured Don Quixote of minding other people’s business. My malady remains.
You shall see more “proofs” shortly.
Yours ever H
Address: Miss E. B. Barrett / 50 Wimpole St / Cavendish Sqre.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. EBB’s manuscript, cut up and amalgamated with Horne’s, is now at Yale (see Reconstruction, D1282). The paper, indicating EBB’s specific contribution, is reprinted at pp. 353–359.
3. I Corinthians, 15:52.
4. Horne embodied this thought in his essay on EBB, speaking of her “frank correspondence with scholars, such as Lady Jane Grey might have written to Roger Ascham” (II, 133). Ascham (1515–68), sometime tutor to Princess Elizabeth, visited the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey (1537–54) in 1550 and describes in The Scholemaster (1570) how he found her reading Plato while the rest of the household was out hunting. William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (1520–98) was Secretary of State to Edward VI and Elizabeth I.
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