5520. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 198.
[London]
Monday, Jan. 9. ’65.
Do you know, I may begin to dislike getting letters from you, if they are always bearers of bad news in this way? Never mind, let us see what next Sunday brings with it. I am much better, not altogether well—that’s the fact: but there is little amiss. I passed the Park-gate yesterday. [1]
Here is exactly the “line”—you ask for: it is a busy day with me,—but, five more of them, and, the long hours of the Public past, please providence that kindly caters for the sparrow, there shall be champagne & chicken at last, [2] —if you continue to “treat,” in your goodness,
Yours hungrily & thirstily ever
Robert Browning.
(Hasn’t Perida [3] just got some nice tall fellow to take his part in this Saturday Review!) [4]
Publication: RB-JW, p. 125.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Presumably Cumberland Gate, on the southeast side of Regent’s Park, directly across from Miss Wedgwood’s street, Cumberland Place.
2. Cf. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont, 1689–1762), “The Lover: a Ballad,” line 26: “And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last.”
3. i.e., RB himself.
4. An unsigned article entitled “Mr. Browning and the Edinburgh Review” appeared in The Saturday Review of 7 January 1865 (pp. 15–17). It was highly critical of the Edinburgh’s reviewer (William Stigand) in his notice of RB’s poems (see letter 5463, note 7): “Here and there, indeed, he makes a vague attempt at grasping the subject of a piece, failing where it is not of the simplest character, but more often contenting himself with some indefinite word of compliment, and letting us carefully know that he ‘by no means concurs in the exaggerated praises which have been heaped upon’ such a poem as Evelyn Hope. Of an attempt to judge the poet’s genius as a whole, of poetical discrimination, there is no trace” (p. 16).
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