SD1920. William Michael Rossetti to William Bell Scott
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 270–271 (in part).
Somerset House,
14 April [1856]
Dear Scott,
It is certainly a brutal shame that I should never have written to you, especially after receiving more than one admonitory message. …
There is also a portrait in water-colour of the archangel Browning, done when he was here last autumn, and as like him as can be. Gabriel and I saw him and his wife rather frequently at that time; and at his house Tennyson, who read us Maud right through, and who, though he talked of scarely anything except the abuse of Maud, is the most impressive man, both in person and otherwise, that I think I ever met. Browning too is a most glorious fellow; natural, simple, kind, vivid, witty, interested in everything worth being interested in, and seeming to possess a knowledge, often profound, always seemingly sufficient, of everything worth knowing. Why don’t you say something in your letter about his two splendid new volumes? or have you not read them? If not, procure them at once somehow or other, and fasten upon Childe Roland, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Fra Lippo Lippi, Karshish the Arab Physician, A Toccata of Galuppi’s and the closing dedication of the book to his wife. Of course there are no end of others tremendously fine, but these occur to me in chief. Mrs. Browning, an interesting little woman, very diminutive but not particularly plain, the very embodiment of fragile sensitiveness, talking sensibly, but not saying anything very remarkable (except the remarkable atrocity that she adores Correggio) is writing a long poem, whereof I know not the subject. Gabriel saw them again in Paris very frequently, having gone there in the autumn, and they are to be in London not long hence, prior to returning to Florence. …
Gabriel, though of course he sends nothing of his own, forwards a very bad portrait of Browning which has been lying with him for some while, done by a Yankee Titian named Page. …
Publication: Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park, Penn., 1990), pp. 62–69.
Manuscript: Arizona State University.
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