Supporting Documents

SD1780.  Robert Maxwell Hanna to John & Frances Julia Pakenham

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 381 (in part).

Florence

21st Oct. ’54.

I have been sadly occupied of late at Leghorn. …

“You have a great gain in having Mrs. Stuart Menteith with you, I gave her ‘Lays’ to Tennyson and Mrs. Browning; the former liked them very much; I have not heard Mrs. B’s opinion. I mentioned something of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, (favorites of mine) to Mrs. B——, and she said with provoking coolness, ‘Yes—very good—but not much in them; better, however, than Scott.” I think she is precisely right as to their being better than Scott, but I insist there is much in them.

Text: Frances Julia Pakenham, Life Lines (London, 1862), pp. 152–153.

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