Monday March 5
Dear H’s birthday kept; & I took advantage of the holiday by going to Malvern with Arabel. As we went into Ruby Cottage, there were so many packages in the breakfast room the door of which was half open,
Annie lying on the sofa in the drawing room with a pain in her face,—& Mrs. Boyd with symptoms of a cough. As soon as I cd. get into Mr. Boyd’s room, I went there. He made me read his preface & some additional translations.
He had had my extracts read to him. After some verbal criticisms, he observed with regard to the blank verses that some of the lines were beautiful, some poor: a circumstance for which he did not so much blame me, as Æschylus. It could not be otherwise in any literal translation of the Prometheus. With regard to the lyrical portion of the extracts, they seemed to him “rather poor”, considering they were my writing—but then “the short time you were in writing them”!— He asked me to let him have some other extracts—the speech about Typhon,[1] & another choral ode,—but he did not press me, so I need not presser. “Has anything [been] fixed about your going away?” No indeed!—nothing!—
He lent me Blomfield’s Æschylus,[2] at my request.
1. Prometheus Bound, ed. cit., pp. 22–24.
2. Charles James Blomfield (1786–1857), Bishop of London, edited five plays of Æschylus. The entry of 8 March indicates that E.B.B. borrowed Æschyli Prometheus Vinctus (Cambridge, 1810).
