6024. RB to George Murray Smith
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 298–299.
19. Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.
Feb. 27. ’68.
Dear Smith,
Will you please send this priggish word I am going to write, to Mr Morley, [1] for preciseness’ sake! In the last fable of Babrius in my Second Edition of Boissonade, Paris, 1844. [2] I find the fourth line run thus–
κἄκτεινε ταύτην, αθρόον μελλων λήψειν. [3]
which, I see, I have corrected conjecturally in the margin to λαβεἴν μέλλων. [4] I daresay latter editors have thought of something like this or better.
After all this priggishness may be only the excuse for saying, under its cover, how much I enjoyed the dinner last night.
Ever yours truly
Robert Browning.
See what a pretty note I found on my return—which I send you lest you should be apprehensive that the poem I had given away [5] might disgrace your edition!
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Cornell University.
1. Probably John Morley (1838–1923), writer and politician, who edited The Fortnightly Review (1867–82) and The Pall Mall Gazette (1880–83). He was made Viscount Morley of Blackburn in 1908.
2. Babrius, Fabulae Lambicae CXXI (1844), compiled by Jean François Boissonade (1774–1857), French classical scholar. The present whereabouts of RB’s copy, which he inscribed “E. & RB,” is unknown (see Reconstruction, A143).
3. Fabulae (1844), 123, 4, p. 65: “Having killed that one, and seizing great heaps for the future.”
4. “To take hold of the future.”
5. Unidentified.
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