SD1572. Mary Russell Mitford to Hugh Pearson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 364 (in part).
[Swallowfield]
April 30th, 1852.
Do you and Lady S____ fix any day that suits you, merely letting me know, without waiting answer, which is sure to be yes!
I knew you would like those letters; but if you knew her [EBB], and her terrible republicanism, and our fights thereanent, you would understand that she must have the fullest conviction of Louis Napoleon’s being better than she says, before she would concede so much. It is the little holding back that is put on for outward form, to make the view from the Champs Elysées accord with that from the Casa Guidi windows. My Mr. Fields (the collector and publisher of De Quincy’s works) is in Paris now. I hope to see him soon after the 12th, and have charged him to find out for me all and everything about the Prince President—certainly the most remarkable man since the Emperor, and worth all the authors that ever blotted fair paper. I care nothing for them, and I am quite astonished at Mrs. Browning’s thinking Lamartine worth talking of. What is very extraordinary about her letters is, that while she was writing two or three lines [sic, for times] a week to me, quite as well or better than those which you have seen, she was finishing, in the “Athenæum,” a series of papers in “The Greek Christian Poets,”—just as bad in point of style, as stilted and inverted as those charming letters are natural and pure. …
Text: Chorley, II, 201–202.
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