5063. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 75–76.
[Florence]
May 1 his 88th year [1862] [1]
Dear Browning, A pleasant light always falls on me, for a moment when a letter comes from you. I trust I shall often have to congratulate you on your studious and intelligent boy. Music and fencing are, in my opinion, more valuable acquisitions than greek and Latin. It is well you do not send him to Rugby or Eton. I went to Rugby just before my eighth birthday, and was pitted, month after month, to fight with boys nearly my age, always a little older, yet I always won. Fagging made me rebellious, but also made me just. There was a mulatto called Blacky Howard. He was treated like a slave. One winter morning I found him at the pump crying bitterly, with two bottles he was ordered to fill: and, being then in the fifth form, I could have a fag of my own exclusively—so I promoted Blacky, with nominal grade. I number this among my few good actions: it was the first of them. Next, I saved a kittens life from being drowned, and had a quarrel for it. If you happen to hear of any other good deed performed by me, call it in question.
Toward the end of the month I hope you will recieve my slender and last volume. [2] When you see Carlyle, tell him how gratified I am at his opinion of my writings, [3] and how often I think of his conversation during the short visit he made me at Bath. [4] My school of poetry is now shut up, and there is an impenetrable door between it and the present now open and flourishing. Some gentlemen ride in the Park to show their horses; I kept within my old grounds and wisht for nothing but exercise in them. Parr [5] said I ought to have written in latin my dialogue of the Cicero’s. [6] He did not know that whatever satisfied me in my english I tried in latin. I did so in this, I had done so in my poetry. Lord Dudl[e]y [7] paid me a high compliment on it, when Francis Hare [8] brought it to him lying ill in bed at Bologna, and read I know not whether the whole or a part, nor where, when Hare said (as he told me) “Now, by God, Ward, this is what Cicero would himself have said,” Ward replied, If he could .. Milnes, and, I hope, you too, will like a few morsels on my small desserte-plate–
Yours truly
W S Landor
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Trinity College, Cambridge.
1. Landor’s 88th year began on 30 January 1862.
2. Heroic Idyls, the publication of which Landor continued to anticipate, but it was not issued until the autumn of 1863.
3. RB informed Landor of Carlyle’s comments in letter 5053.
4. On 31 July 1850 (see Carlyle, 25, 129). Ten years later, Carlyle recounted the visit in conversation with Vernon Lushington (see letter 4778).
5. Samuel Parr (1747–1825), pedagogue and classical scholar.
6. “Conversation XVIII: Marcus Tullius Cicero and His Brother Quinctus,” Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1824), II, 349–394.
7. John William Ward (1781–1833), 1st Earl Dudley (1827), politician.
8. Francis George Hare (1786–1842), elder brother of Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855).
___________________
