Thursday. Feb. 9th.
Bummy & Arabel went in the carriage to Malvern with me: & H & Stormy were outriders. We went after breakfast, at eleven o’clock. Mrs. Trant carried my party to Gt Malvern in a fly, & I pursued my course to R C in my wheelbarrow.
Mrs. B Annie & Miss H M in the dining room. I soon went up to Mr. Boyd. He received me as Leila’s friends wd. have done:[1] & immediately talked of going out to walk with Miss H M— But I ought not to blame him. He assured me again & again that if he had not had a heaviness in his head he wd. not have thought of it—that he preferred staying with me. I urged him to go. After all he did not!— He found that I cd. make my criticisms as I was reading,—& therefore he wd. stay to hear them: & they lasted until half past three. He adopted nearly every one of them, & my construction of the passage πως ου κατηγορεις εκεινο;[2] besides. We had Gregory out, & it was pronounced to be certainly right in defiance of the Latin version which was in my critical teeth.
Before I went away, I asked if Mrs. B had mentioned going away in May. Not lately. “But why shd. you be anxious for us to stay when you think there is no chance of staying yourself altogether at Hope End?” Because the period of our staying is uncertain.
Left Mr. Boyd at four. He asked me to go again next week to examine some observations of Billius on the oration which he has translated—[3] By the way it is really a beautiful translation.
1. E.B.B.’s poem (Leila: a Tale, London, 1913, pp. 32–35) told how Leila from motives of sympathy released a captive, who then killed her father, so that Leila was indirectly responsible for his death.
2. Gregory’s phrase was: “̓εκ͂εινο δὲ πῶς οὐ κατηγορ͂εις” (“How then do you not make that accusation?”: GNO, I, 621, “In Christi Nativitatem”). E.B.B. has omitted the particle “then” and has changed the word order.
3. Jacques de Billy (1535–81), Latinized as Jacobus Billius, was the editor and principal commentator of E.B.B.’s 1690 edition of Gregory.
