1716. Robert Shelton Mackenzie to EBB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 139–140.

Oxford.

Sep. 16. 1844

Madam,

I have to thank you for the explicit & frank reply you have been so kind as to make to my enquiry.

The translation, [1] if I mistake not, first made your name known—albeit it appeared without your name on the title-page. It will be necessary, perhaps, to say that you did publish a volume of translations:—but this shall be precisely as you please.– You will not object, I hope, to my quoting the lines referring to you in Leigh Hunt[’]s Feast of the Violets. [2] They have as much truth as grace.

The “Dictionary” will not be biographical, but I should like to give, when ascertainable, the date & place of birth of each author.

Let me add that I am well pleased to learn that there will be an American Edition of your poems. The TransAtlantic vendors are not particular what sort of prose they reprint (—ex: gr: my own “Titian,” [3] which they crammed into a 3 penny pamphlet) but, and I know America well, they will not republish any poems except they have reason to think well of them. A novel will go off in Thousands, but it is the merit of the poems, & not the curiosity of the public, which carries off a volume of verse, in the Western World.

I am, Madam,

Faithfully Your obt

R. Shelton Mackenzie

Miss Barrett.

Address: Miss Barrett / 50 Wimpole St / London.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.

1. i.e., of Æschylus, Prometheus Bound.

2. For Leigh Hunt’s lines on EBB in “The Feast of Violets,” see SD825.1, vol. 3.

3. Mackenzie’s Titian, a Romance of Venice appeared in 1843.

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