SD2290. John Forster to John Lothrop Motley

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 364 (in part).

46 Montagu Square

28th Septembr ’59

My dear Mr Motley

I was very glad to hear from you—though your note reaches me as I am on the point of leaving London for a six weeks holiday.

I shall be again here in the middle of November, and hope you will let me know in what corner of this huge place you may then have nicked yourself. I feared you had gone back to America.

Excellent lines of my old friend Story (who I hope has not forgotten me—as most assuredly my recollections of him are vivid still)—full of sense & wit—and I doubt not they will be most acceptable to the Examinr to whose Editor I have sent them. I resigned the Editorship of this journal into other hands now more than two years ago—as probably you are not aware. I found it incompatible with official duties I had then recently undertaken.

Remember me most kindly to Mr & Mrs Story when you write. I feel very grateful to him just now for many acts of great & kindly kindness he has lately shown to an old & very dear friend of mine—W. S. Landor.

Of course every word you say of L. Napoleon has my heartiest concurrence. That poem was a portentous one certainly. And yet Mrs Browning’s faith appears at first to have been sorely shaken—for the Villa Franca peace threw her into a sickbed, from which she can only just now have risen.– It is a strange delusion in a woman of such unquestionable genius–

Yours alys sincerely

John Forster

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: University of Texas.

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