4619. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 215–216.
[Florence]
[Postmark: 10 March 1860]
My dear Browning, I am ready to dash my head against the wall, on reading that you have taken the trouble to transcribe my poetry while you could be writing much better yourself. I only wished the titles. Of late I have been occupied in collecting (by desire, as actors say, altho I am no actor) scraps of my old follies. Our friend Mr Fields says he intends, at some time or other, to publish a complete edition of my Works. [1] What I have ready for him he shall have on his return to Florence. Among other things there is a second conversation between Homer and Laertes. [2] He must take the first and prefix it. I can only say it is elaborate, and has cost me four sheets of paper– I hope you will not think they have been badly spent. My time is worth less, altho’ they took more of it. —Now for what is of greater importance—Mrs Browning’s health. She will soon be strong enough to return here, together with the brave adscitus [3] to the Equestrian order. He is quick at learning. I never was. Some idle thought always dropt in between me and my book, and I had often to learn again what I had learnt a few minutes before. Had it not been for my resolution to get beyond a cousin a year older, I should have been a dunce. I jockied him by learning in bed, not only my lesson, but seven or eight words in the dictionary. Before I was nine years old I had gained a remove, and before I was ten another, a third at thirteen. —Ah my poor cousin William Venour. [4] He went early to the naval Academy at Portsman [sic, for Portsmouth], and excelled in mathematics, geometry, &c. and Lord St Vincent, [5] my father’s [6] old friend, patronized him. He was a lieutenant in the navy at sixteen, and was commander of the Calypso at twentyfive. He went down in her. [7] The Admiral who commanded in the West Indies ordered him home with despaches. His friends said Venour, you can not go—the crazy ship will founder. He only replied “I have orders[”]—he sailed the next day, and went down—nobody knows in what part of the Atlantic. He was as brave as a lion and as gentle as a lamb, and would now, probably, have been the oldest of the admirals, if living at 87 years of age. There were nine brothers and sisters; all came to maturity; all are dead.
Goodbye–
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 28. 2o Piano Via del Tritone / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-5, p. 28 (as March 1860).
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Ticknor and Fields in 1856 had published Selections of Walter Savage Landor, but the firm never published a complete edition of his works.
2. Published in Heroic Idyls (1863) as “Homer. Laertes. Agatha” with the subtitle “In the Morning.” The first conversation, “Homer and Laertes,” which appeared in The Hellenics (Edinburgh, 1859), was revised for Heroic Idyls and renamed “Homer, Laertes, Agatha.”
3. “Accepted one.”
4. William Venour (1773–1803), son of John Venour (1734–87) and his wife, Catherine (née Landor, 1745–1825).
5. John Jervis (1735–1823), Earl of St. Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty (1801–04).
6. Dr. Walter Landor (1733–1805), of Ipsley Court, Warwickshire. In 1774 he married, as his second wife, Elizabeth Savage (1743–1829), daughter and co-heir of Charles Savage of Tachbrooke. Walter Savage Landor was their eldest child.
7. H.M.S. Calypso, a British sloop of war commanded by Venour (from 1802) sank in a storm on 30 July 1803 after being run down by one of the West Indies merchant ships she was escorting from Jamaica to England.
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