SD1974. Diary Entry of Ford Madox Brown
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 253 (in part).
[London]
7th [October 1856]
Dined with William Rossetti & after to Brownings where was a woman with a large nose [?Ellen Heaton]. Hope I may never meet her again. Browning’s conversational powers very great, told some good stories, one about the buy [sic] gone days of Drury Lane, about the advice that a very experienced stage carpenter of 50 years standing at the theater gave to a young man who wished for an engagement there but had not, it was objected, voice enough. The advice was to get a pot of XXXX & put it on the stage beside him & having the boards all to himself he was first to drink & then to hollow with all his might, then to drink again & so on, which the aspirant litterally did—remaining of course a muff as he had begun, however, I spoil that one. He said that one evening he was at Carlyle’s, that sage teacher after abusing Mozart Bethhoven [sic] & modern music generally set Mrs C to show Browning what was the right sort of music which was some scotch tune on an old piano with such base as pleased providence or rather, said Browning, as did not please providence. An italian sinner who belonged to that highest & in this country scarce to be believed in degree of criminality, which requires that some very exalted dignitary of the church be resorted to before absolution can be obtained for atrocities too heinous for the cleansing powers of the ordinary priest, was likened to a spider, who having fallen into a bottle of ink gets out & crawls & sprawls & blots right over the whole of gods table of laws.
Text: The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven, Conn., 1981), p. 191.
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