679. EBB to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 114.
[Torquay]
[ca. January 1839] [1]
My ever dearest Georgie,
I entreat your forgiveness for the inscrutable & mystical wrong I have done you, together with your acceptance of some expression of my gratitude for Ben Jonson [2] whom I accepted before as your gift upon Sette’s affidavit. Considering everything you certainly are excusable in being so ashamed of sending such a gift, as to disavow the doing so. A pretty person you are to preach against extravagances—& then to behave so!—— Nay, to behave so again & again & again!! If you had been Socrates you wd have sacrificed a pair of doves to Venus, (doves!) as well as the cock to Æsculapius! [3] —you are inconsistent enough, qualified enough for two sides of every question, to be fit already for the heights of your profession. Seriously Georgie, were you Attorney General, I shd say ‘I am obliged to you,’—were you on the Woolsack, [4] I shd say “Thank you”—but in the present state of things, you are one of the very most incorrigible abominable people I ever knew.
So I wont thank you. I read Ben Jonson, & think of you dearest Georgie instead.
In a letter from Miss Mitford, dated not very long ago, she says—“I hate the law & all its professors. Dont you?”—Why of course I do–
You are none of you to abuse me for writing—I have done it day by day. I dare’nt write to Stormie, unless my courage revives.
Your attached Ba–
Address, on integral page: George G Barrett Esqr
Publication: B-GB, pp. 39–40.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference in letter 700 to George’s having “sent me in the winter Barry Cornwall’s Ben Jonson.”
2. The Works of Ben. Jonson, With a Memoir of his Life and Writings, ed. B.W. Procter, 1838 (see Reconstruction, A1324).
3. i.e., to give thanks for recovery from an illness, as described in Jonson’s Epigram XIII: “When men a dangerous disease did ’scape, / Of old, they gave a cock to Æsculape: / Let me give two, that doubly am got free; / From my disease’s danger, and from thee” (II, 666 in Procter’s edition).
4. The seat in the House of Lords of the Lord Chancellor while presiding over the proceedings of the House. It is stuffed with wool as a symbol of England’s one-time staple trading commodity.
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