SD917. Lady Dacre to Mary Russell Mitford
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 4.
Kimpton Vicarage
Thursday. [28 June 1838]
My dear Miss Mitford,
As soon as I read yours, with enclosure for Miss Fox, I set off to little Holland House with them; we had a long talk, and she was everything we could wish. I now begin to open my heart to hopes that make it thump against my ribs very comfortably. I left town the day after I saw Miss Fox, and return thither on Saturday, when, if I find any possible means of playing the part of the fly on the wheel in the fable, I shall full as happy and vainglorious as that same celebrated fly. I grieve to think of the disappointment you have undergone about “Otto” and your novel, and the unpleasant consequences in your domestic comfort; you have so many friends, and your works as well as yourself are so much esteemed, that at romantic moments I say, “Oh yes, we shall succeed,” and then come my worldly knowledge and knocks over my castles in the air. I wonder whether the Archbishop of Canterbury has any voice in these things? I could propitiate him. Surely it is no joke to have written the finest and most successful tragedy of the age; when I say “finest,” I mean as an acting play, for experience has proved that. I am not so faithless to my glorious Joanna as to use that expression in an unqualified sense. You would not like me if I did. Apropos of that noble creature, I called on her a few days before I left town, and thought both herself and her sister much broken. I have a lovely letter from her to-day; but it is the letter of the lovely spirit about to depart to its native sphere. “In its weak virtues wrapped and best prepared,” vide my own translation of a part of Petrarch’s “Trionfo della Morte.” And now, my dear Miss Mitford, I will release you, and hope to have something to say ere long better worth your reading.
Yours very sincerely,
B. Dacre
P.S.—I have sent my book to Miss Barrett, and have a sweet note from her. I shall try to niggle on with her; but I am too deaf and old, I fear, to scrape acquaintance with a young person.
Text: L’Estrange, II, 20–21.
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