1551. Richard Hengist Horne to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 231.
[London]
Monday Morng [Postmark: 26 February 1844]
My dear Miss Barrett do not trouble yourself to look for any more quo[t]ations, as it is too late now. I have used many of those you were so kind as to send with great effect.
The proof I was to send you will not be ready so soon in the day as I had expected; but in the course of the day (afternoon) I will send a boy with it—with directions to call again for it in an hour and a half—and then to wait till you send it down.
Yours truly [1]
I fancy we shall flutter the Volscians [2] in the course of a week. This is my last day—at the printers, I mean.
P.S. I recommend you to lose no time in telling Mr Mathews that you have no power to help him in the Athenæum, and that any attempt to help anybody there always sets Dilke’s back up against the party like a forest pig. If you do not do this, and Mr Mathews sh’d be cut up—or slaughtered, he will attribute the hubub to you negatively at least. [3]
I have quoted him in a motto—chiefly to please you. [4] And there are few things I would not do to please you.
Address: Miss E. B. Barrett / 50 Wimpole St / Cavendish Sqre.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. The handwriting in much of this letter seems to indicate great haste, as does Horne’s failure to sign it.
2. Cf. Coriolanus, V, 6, 115.
3. EBB had intimated to Mathews in letter 1310 that Dilke was averse to attempts to exert influence on him.
4. Horne used a quotation from Mathews’s Poems on Man (1843) as preface to the paper on Mrs. Shelley (II, 224); he also quoted from the poem in the text of the article on Taylor and the author of Festus (II, 297).
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