319.5. Edmund Henry Barker to EBB
This late entry would have appeared in The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 2.
Thetford,
Sept. 8, 1828.
My dear Madam,
I have delayed answering your courteous and elegant Letter till I had occasion to write to Sir Uvedale Price, & could employ his Son to protect my Letter with his frank. I am very well pleased with the approbation, which you have expressed of my books—I am glad that you found something to interest you in them—I am most particularly delighted that you have perceived the candour & impartiality, which pervade them, because many do not discern them. Mr J. Taylor, the author of the excellent book, which advocates the claims of Sir Philip Francis, & who is a London-bookseller, sent to me a very handsome Letter about the Junius, which I will transcribe for your perusal, as it is short:—“Once for all let me thank you for your obliging communications, which, now that I am in complete possn of them, shall receive immediate attention. You have made an exceedingly curious book, & one that will be generally interesting—to the Junius-hunter particularly so, & to none more than, dear Sir, your obliged & obedt servt J. T.” From this Letter you will perceive that he meditates a reply. I consider much of my reasoning beyond reply, & many of my facts indisputable; but he may have additional arguments to produce in favour of his hero, & he shall have a patient hearing from me, as I have no pride of opinion, & am always open to conviction. I know not whether you have perceived the peculiarity of my mode of reasoning. Mr Taylor’s is the common mode, & his reasoning is correct according to that mode. Hence the vast impression produced by his book—it has satisfied numbers. But those numbers cannot resist my counter-reasoning, when it is set before them. Perhaps I cannot better illustrate my independent way of reasoning than by asking you to examine carefully what I have said in p. xxvii–xxxiii, also p. 181. The lawyers would be against me at starting, but can they answer me? I think not. You are young, & therefore I am desirous of directing your particular attention to the subject, & I will mention one thing, which has just occurred to me, & which shews the advantage of having an unfettered mind. Mr Brougham, in his speech on the State of the Law, thinks our system of trial by jury perfect—all the lawyers think so, & I never met with any person, who thought otherwise. But in one respect it is founded on a most erroneous principle: it requires an unanimous verdict in a case of murder, (for I will instance that, because murder is almost always proved solely by circumstantial evidence.) If you invited a party of twelve gentlemen to dine with you, & you asked them to give their opinions on the case, you would find that the evidence would strike them differently; some would be inclined to doubt, some would be certain, & so on according to the diversity of their minds, their knowledge, their experience etc., but you would never succeed in bringing them to one mind & one opinion. It is quite contrary to the principles of human nature to expect such unanimity, & yet the law expects it. The consequence is that jurymen frequently give up their own opinions in order to be unanimous—they either acquit or condemn in spite of their own conviction—the law, which imposes an oath on them, actually compels them, as it were, to violate it! Let the system, then, be changed, & adopt the French mode of determining guilt or innocence by the majority of votes.
Your remarks on the compiled matter in the Parriana are very judicious, & if the book be reprinted, much may be done agreeably to what you suggest. At the time I had not read Sir Uvedale Price’s remarks on the ὑγςὸν νὠτον, or else I should have referred to them: they are quite satisfactory. I think it probable that Dr Parr’s Letter to Mr Payne Knight was occasioned by Mr Knight’s having asked Dr Parr’s opinion in consequence of what Sir Uvedale had written on the passage, or of what Sir Uvedale had said to Mr Knight in conversation. Dr Parr’s Letter said
<su>ch subjects were always valuable, because he was not content with illustrating the point immediately under consideration, but diverged to collateral topics in a spirit of philosophical investigation.
Perhaps you can tell to me who Lady Mary Shepherd is?
With respect to Porson’s admission to Mr Taylor, I am sorry that I had not space to guard my meaning from any misapprehension, when I was writing the note in question. But I will do the thing better, if the book be reprinted. I did not consider that the anecdotes depreciated Porson at all—on the contrary they raise him in my estimation, because they shew the candour & simplicity of his mind. Porson might get on very well in construing the Lives, though Plutarch’s style is by no means easy; but a great part of his Works are philosophical, & they would be ‘too much’ for scholars in general, if they were suddenly put into their hands for translation. One cause of the difficulty of translating Plutarch, is the immense number of epithets, which he attaches to nouns. I cannot just now recollect the exact place, but I have somewhere seen Plutarch mentioned as the most difficult author to translate. On one occasion too, which I shall endeavour to recollect more particularly, Porson declined construing some lines in Aeschylus, saying that he was not fresh from the perusal of him? Such honest confessions would not be made but by strong-headed & strong-minded men. I think too that Jeremiah Markland fairly owns that there are many passages in Horace, which he cannot construe. If Mr Taylor had heard Markland say so, & had reported it to me, & I had written it in a book, would you not have thought it derogatory to Markland’s scholarship, & have doubted the authenticity of the tale? Porson was very great, optimus maximus in Greek Tragedy & Comedy—illa se jactet in aula, but where would he have been, if you had set before him Aristotle, Plotinus etc.? He had no knowledge of the subject, & his knowledge of Greek would not have helped him—he would have been a μέτοικος in that Athens. My paper is run out before my subjects are exhausted. You see that I write to you with the freedom of an old acquaintance—it is my bad habit, I cannot be stiff & awkward. With much esteem I remain, my dear Madam, your friend & servant,
E. H. Barker
Sir Uvedale does not attempt a definition of the picturesque: are you curious to see mine?
Address, on integral page: Miss Barrett / Hope-End / Ledbury / Herefordshire.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
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