A Letter Book

I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most interesting library in Utopia.

116

See Wordsworth's Triad.

117

Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph which, stating that an inquest had been held on some one who, after lecturing somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded thus: "Verdict: death from natural causes."

118

No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer two thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though her tresses are not "yellow."

119

Clever as she was, she surely made a mistake here – unless she did it on purpose, which is quite possible. "Cadger" is of course only "beggar," and the proverb is the Scotch equivalent of ours about the "beggar on horseback," pretty frequently illustrated now-a-days.

120

The Deerbrook breakfasts refer to Miss Martineau's poor novel. (T. C.)

121

Turned. (T. C.)

122

Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about "What is bred in the bone," etc. – as for instance when, while admitting Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the Letters "for the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to call such criticism itself "trashy."

123

Anna Jameson (1794-1860) was a woman of letters and an art-critic at one time of immense influence through her illustrated books on "Sacred and Legendary" (as well as some other) "Art." But, as somehow or other happens not infrequently, the objects of her "affection and generosity" did not include her husband.

124

"Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men" are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so childish as Landor, had much in common.

125

The curious eulogy – preferring it to Oxford as being "large and busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London – is also very characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country and in a large town – hardly in a small one.

126

Sometimes one thinks her the wisest woman who ever lived. "Nothing seems stranger than the delusions of other people when they have ceased to be our own" suggests La Rochefoucauld and comes near to Solomon; but whosoever may have anticipated or prompted her, he is not at the moment within my memory. But she is often not wise at all: and even her good wits are not always left unaffected by her bad temper. It is really amusing to read Mrs. Carlyle's rather mischievous account of Mrs. Butler (F. K.'s married name) calling and carrying a whip "to keep her hand in": and then to come on F. K.'s waspish resentment at these words, when they were published.

127

One of the pleasantest, to me, of Dickens's letters is that in which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see inf. under Stevenson). But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.

128

Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.

129

"The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's Not so Bad as we Seem, acted by Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years ago, and about to be reproduced in loco as these proofs are being revised.

130

Of this moratorium I believe I duly advised R. L. S. and I don't think he objected. There was, if I remember rightly, a further reason for it – that I was living in two places at the time and the subject was not immediately at hand.

131

Lockhart's (self-given) name in the "Chaldee MS." was "the Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men."

132

Maupassant's ineffable hero and title-giver.

133

Hardly any school-boy of my or Stevenson's generation would have needed a reference to the Essay on Murder. But I am told that De Quincey has gone out of fashion, with school-boys and others.

134

We know now: also what "The Duke" said when consulted. They did not agree with Stevenson, but then they knew all the facts and he did not.

135

I should have held it myself, if the facts had been what R. L. S. thought them.

136

Which of course is Mr. Kipling's property, not mine. But he has most kindly joined in, authorising its publication, and that of the rest of the letter as far as he is concerned.