4615. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 208–209.
[Florence]
[Postmark: 5 March 1860]
My dear Browning,
Two days ago I recieved a letter from the fair Edith, and I began this morning to write an answer and so inclose a few lines to you. She tells me that you are very busy with poetry. This I rejoice at hearing—you and your incomparable wife are running neck and neck, so sportsmen say. Whichever’s verses I read last I like best—no others come between. Do not believe that Forster wrote to me on my birthday. When he says his prayers, I hope he will lay a peculiar emphasis on the words “and the truth is not in us.” [1] Never did so much foam and froth boil over from any furnace. You need not tell him that I never received his letter. He knows it. No letter addrest to me miscarries. I am amuzed by the intelligence you gave me of a notice of my Hellenics in a Saturday Review. [2] I never read Reviews since Southey workt in one. [3] You interest me greatly more by telling me that Robert is diligent in his latin. May you live to read his translation of Pericles and Aspasia. [4] He himself can hardly be expected to live long enough to see anything else resembling, or ambitious of resembling, the attic. Our English authors, in poetry or prose, have not even got a glimpse of the Romans. This brings to my recollection some lines I wrote on Bulwer’s Last Days of Pompeii– [5] I will write them opposite.
If aught so damping or so dull were
As the Last Days of Dandy Bulwer,
And you had thrown it on the “pluvious”
Fire-flakes that issued from Vesuvius,
They could no more have reacht Pompeii
Than Rome or Tusculum or Veii
Here has been a grand ball at Florence, with four thousand invitations. The English naval officers from Leghorn were loudly and heartily cheered; at which the French, who also were invited, but who recieved no such salutation, were (to use their own expression) chagrined. —Doubtless you have already heard the unfortunate marriage of Garibaldi. His lady has gone off to Lucerne with her gallant, and their child in procinto. [6] Pray tell Gibson how greatly I shall feel flattered by a visit from him, and the sooner the better. Did I express the high delight I received from Mrs Stowe[’]s last work. [7] It is full of thought and of poetry. I fear there is a gloom over The Holiness of our Lord. But there may be hopes for him, now it is agreed by the Potentates that confusion shall remain in Italy, and that the priests shall have a little more time to seduce the people– Enough of politics—I will not let mine weary you, nor even myself– So adieu, and believe me, now and for ever, Your obliged and affectionate
W. S Landor
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 2d Piano 28 Via del Tritone / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-5, pp. 26–27 (as 12 February 1860).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. I John 1:8: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
2. The notice appeared in The Saturday Review of 25 February 1860 (pp. 248–250). Although the reviewer admitted that the book contained “passages of great poetic beauty” and that “a happy selection of gems might be made from it,” it was too long. The reviewer also complained of Landor’s obscurity and orthographic eccentricities.
3. The Quarterly Review, to which Robert Southey (1774–1843) contributed from its founding in 1809 to the late 1830’s.
4. Meaning, presumably, a Latin translation of Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia (2 vols., 1836). Aspasia (ca. 470–ca.400 B.C.), of Miletus, one of the twelve Ionian cities, was a courtesan of intellectual attainments, who immigrated to Athens and became the mistress of the Athenian statesman Pericles (ca. 495–429 B.C.).
5. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834).
6. “Imminent” (see letter 4612, note 14).
7. The Minister’s Wooing, serialised in The Atlantic Monthly (1858–59) and subsequently published in New York in 1859, is set in eighteenth-century New England. It is critical of Calvinism, the religion in which Mrs. Stowe was raised.
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