SD2916. Benjamin Jowett to Florence Nightingale
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 368 (in part).
Balliol College
Oxford
[25 June 1867]
I sometimes think that you have not the temper of success. When you or Sir Bartle Frere …
I like to hear my friend Mr Browning say ‘I have just finished a poem (I am ashamed to tell you the length—about 20,000 lines); I am sure that it is by far the best thing which I have yet done & when I have done that, I shall try to do something better still, & so on as long as I live! And I like to think of myself as beginning & not ending (though this may be a fancy) & I want you to let me think the same of you.[’]
You kindly ask about Mr Browning’s degree D.C.L. (Your friend Sir Bartle is to have a degree). Stage 1st, A fortnight ago his degree was proposed in the Council but he failed to obtain the 2/3rds of the votes: Stage the 2nd, his friends in the hope partly of preventing this disgrace falling upon the University, memorialize the Council (about 100 residents signed) requesting that the degree might be conferred. Stage 3rd, The Council, being alarmed, & also unwilling to say that they had been wrong, agree that he shall have an Hon. M.A. degree. Did you ever hear of anything so idiotic? The last occurred today.
What do you think I have been doing for the last 2 days—entertaining a large party of folks—Mr. Browning, Lady Airlie, Mr. M. Arnold, Mr. Munro of Cambridge, Mr. Lecky, the Lingens &c.
Publication: Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett’s Letters to Florence Nightingale, ed. Vincent Quinn and John Prest (Oxford, 1987), pp. 126–127, as [June 1867].
Manuscript: Balliol College.
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