5906. Julia Wedgwood to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 202–203.
Cumberland Place
May 17 / 67
It has given me a lively pleasure to see your handwriting again, dear friend,—& to receive your kind offer, though prefaced by the fiction that I may well have changed my mind &c—in which but that you added “I dont suppose so” I should be tempted to suspect you had forgotten Captain Absolute’s advice not to tell more lies than are necessary! [1]
I wish I might see the mss. you greatly underrate my powers of deciphering obscurities if you suppose them exceeded by a mere printer’s devil, & surely the form wd suit the matter all the better if it gave scope for a few hypothetical readings. But I shall be very glad to exercise my ingenuity upon it any way at any time. I have often longed since our last meeting for opportunity & sarcasm to remark on the long delay of the appearance of your Italian, but I consoled myself for wanting the first by the recollection that certainly the last would fail me. Nevertheless I am disappointed not to see you again—but why waste my pen & ink in telling you what you know so well?– I did not know my Mother had asked you, so the disappointment is the less. I will tell her what you say—do as you think best dear friend, I only wish to see you again a long way after wishing things to be just as you like,—this is very far from being the case in large matters, happily it is not impossible in such very small ones as all that relates to yours ever
FJW.
I have seen you twice in the street since we parted, but I did not think that a favourable opportunity for my attack!
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 142–143.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Captain Absolute, a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1795), instructs his servant, who has been lying for him, to “never say more than is necessary” (II, 1, 29).
___________________
