2313. Walter Savage Landor to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 248–249.

[Bath]

[Postmark: 15 April 1846]

My dear Browning,

Let us agree to drop Sirs for ever. And now accept my thanks for the richest of Easter offerings made to anyone for many years.

I staid at home last evening on purpose to read Luria, and if I lost any good music (as I certainly did) I was well compensated in Mind. Today I intend to devote the rainy hours entirely to The Soul’s Tragedy. I wonder whether I shall find it as excellent as Luria. You have conferred too high a distinction on me in your graceful Inscription. I am more of a dramatist in prose than in poetry. My imagination, like my heart, has always been with the women: I mean the young: for I can not separate that adjective from that substantive. This has taught me, above all things, the immeasurable superiority of Shakspeare. His women raise him to it. I mean the immensity of the superiority; the superiority would exist without.

I am sometimes ready to shed tears at his degradation in Comedy. I wd almost have given the first joint of my forefinger rather than he shd have written, for instance, such trash as that in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. His wit is pounded and spiced and polted, and covered with rancidity at last. A glass of champagne at Moliere’s is very refreshing after his British Spirits. Go on, and pass us poor devils. If you do not go far ahead of me, I will crack my whip at you and make you spring forward. So, to use a phraze of Queen Elizabeth, “Yours as you demean yourself”– [1]

W. Landor

Address: Robert Browning Esq / In the care of Mr Moxon / 44 Dover Street / London. Redirected: New Cross, Hatcham / Surrey.

Publication: BBIS-5, p. 18 (as [17 April 1846]).

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. We have been unable to verify Landor’s attribution of this quotation to Elizabeth I.

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