5338. RB to Walter Savage Landor
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 20–21.
[London]
[ca. 19] [February 1864] [1]
Dear Mr Landor,
I receive the following note from Mr Bruce [2] “I send you from the forthcoming Life of Sir W. Napier a letter on his old and valued friend W.S.L. [3] which you are at liberty to forward to him: pray assure him how affectionately he is remembered by my wife, the Norah Napier [4] of his Bath days, and how much read and venerated by—H. A. Bruce.” I will endeavour to send you the Life whenever it appears: Forster is taking measures to let you have his “Life of Eliot[.]” [5]
I trust you are better than when you wrote last: I hope to see you in the summer, you know,—may you be your old self by then! Be assured, we all think of you, as Mr Bruce says, with affection and veneration– Robert desires his truest love to be expressed to you with that of
Yours ever
Robert Browning.
Address, on cover sheet: W. S. Landor Esq.
Docket, in Landor’s hand: From Browning with much from Napier on W. S. Landor. / Received Feb. 23. ’64.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library, Gordon N. Ray Bequest.
1. Dating based on docket.
2. Henry Austin Bruce (1815–95), politician, was currently M.P. for Merthyr Tydfil.
3. From Napier to William Lloyd Caldecot, published in Bruce’s, Life of General Sir William Napier (2 vols., 1864), II, 404–406.
4. Norah Creina Blanche Bruce (née Napier, 1827–97), daughter of Sir William Napier (1785–1860)—see letter 4545, note 4—and his wife, Caroline Amelia (née Fox, 1790–1860). She married, as his second wife, Henry Bruce in 1854.
5. Sir John Eliot: A Biography (2 vols., 1864) by John Forster was published by Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green on 3 March 1864. Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), politician, opposed Charles I regarding parliamentary law and consequently was imprisoned in the Tower (1629), where he died.
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