Correspondence

5849.  RB to William Cox Bennett

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 155–156.

19. Warwick Crescent,

Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.

Jan: 27. ’67.

My dear Mr Bennett, [1]

It is now a great many years since I began receiving kindnesses at your hands: let me only hope that by speaking at last I shall not break the series. I have often wanted to thank you, however superfluous the assurance of thanks truly felt might be: and the thanks do not go simply to your goodness in caring to give me your poems, [2] but also to much that is beautiful and good in them: be certain that the “rugged B” sees all the advantage of smoothness when it commends so much that is wise & generous to his fellows as it does in the verse of the other “anything-but-rugged B.” But Bs of all sorts hive together, and find enough to do in the various plots of the garden while daylight lasts; and I wish you the fullest of honey-bags, very heartily.

Ever yours

Robert Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Eton College Library, Michael Meredith Collection.

1. William Cox Bennett (1820–95), minor poet. He had plagued the Brownings for years with his presentation copies (see Michael Meredith, “The Two B’s: Browning and Bennett,” BN, 9, Fall 1972, 9–16).

2. Presumably a copy of Bennett’s Our Glory-Roll, and Other National Poems ([1867]), published earlier in the month (see “List of New Books,” The Athenæum, 12 January 1867, no. 2046, p. 49).

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