SD2544. Robert Bulwer Lytton to Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 342 (in part).

Vienna

8 Decr. [1861] [1]

I ought sooner to have thanked you, my dearest father, for yr. last most kind & very interesting letters but I have been anxious to accompany my reply by the Review on Lever, & have been working it off post haste, as I have recd from L two very urgent appeals for speedy publication. … I am delighted by what you say about Browning, & entirely concur in it. With all the merits which I believe him to possess, & need not recapitulate, his great & grevious defect is defect of taste. He has frequent vulgarities of expression, and a certain jest of clumsiness and incompleteness of form at times which is distressing. I believe that were he not confirmed in all his faults by the shallow abuse of despicable critics, and the unqualified eulogy of a small clique, his own artistic experience wd eventually do much to correct this. But altho’ I see very clearly what you object to, & dont at all defend it, I feel that, from various causes, <***>

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Lord Cobbold.

1. Dated by reference to Lytton’s review of Lever which appeared in Blackwood’s “Works of Charles Lever,” April 1862.

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