2825. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 35.
Three Mile Cross,
Dec. 16, 1849.
This is my birthday (sixty-two), my beloved friend, and I cannot better employ it than in answering your dear letter received two days ago. For myself, I should certainly have said that I was much better than this time last year, if it were not that I have had to-day a touch of that painful neuralgia, and that I have been suffering in consequence of having the small-pox in the house. It has been most rife in the neighbourhood, and very heavy. Three or four persons have died of it after vaccination.
All the world is publishing. Alfred Tennyson says that people now-a-days are not merely indifferent to poetry—that they absolutely hate it. I heard this from a sweet young woman (Mary Repton, [1] daughter of one of the prebendaries of Westminster), who is staying close by, at Mrs. Anderdon’s, [2] and has taken to me as young people sometimes do. She is intimate, very, with all the Tennysons, and speaks of them more highly than I ever heard any one; perhaps because she knows them better. She says that they are the most unworldly people she ever knew, valuing everybody by the personal qualities, apart from all considerations of rank or wealth or fame or consideration. Indolence is the besetting sin of the race; but they can work if they will. For instance, she made Alfred dig up the whole garden at her father’s country living near Sevenoaks; and he did it capitally.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 216.
1. Mary Ellis Repton (1813–98) was the daughter of Edward Repton (1782–1860), Prebendary of Westminster, and his wife Mary Ellis (née Herbert, 1785?–1875).
2. Mary Hannah Anderdon (née Casamajor, 1774–1851), step-grandmother of Lucy Partridge, was the second wife of John Proctor Anderdon (1760–1846).
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