The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54, Edited by Edward Abbott Parry

It having been noted in the Athenaeum , June 9, 1888, that rumours were afloat doubting the authenticity of these letters, and that these rumours would sink to rest if the history of the originals were published, I hasten to adopt my reviewer's suggestion, and give an outline of their story. They are at present in the hands of the Rev. Robert Longe at Coddenham Vicarage, Suffolk, where they have been for the last hundred years. At Sir William Temple's death in 1698, he left no other descendants than two grand-daughters—Elizabeth and Dorothy. Elizabeth died without issue in 1772; Dorothy married Nicholas Bacon, Esq. of Shrubland Hall in the parish of Coddenham. Dorothy left a son, the Rev. Nicholas Bacon, who was vicar of Coddenham. This traces the letters to Coddenham Vicarage. The Rev. Nicholas Bacon dying without issue, bequeathed Coddenham Vicarage, with the pictures and papers therein, to the Rev. John Longe, who had married his wife's sister. The Rev. John Longe, who died in 1835, was the father of the present owner. This satisfactorily accounts for the letters being in their present hands, and these stated facts will, I trust, set at rest the fears or hopes of sceptics.
EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY.
MANCHESTER, October 1888.

An editor, says Dr. Johnson, is he that revises or prepares any work for publication; and this definition of an editor's duty seems wholly right and satisfactory. But now that the revision of these letters is apparently complete, the reader has some right to expect a formal introduction to a lady whose name he has, in all probability, never heard; and one may not be overstepping the modest and Johnsonian limits of an editor's office, when the writing of a short introduction is included among the duties of preparation.
Dorothy Osborne was the wife of the famous Sir William Temple, and apology for her biography will be found in her own letters, here for the first time published. Some of them have indeed been printed in a Life of Sir William Temple by the Right Honourable Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, a man better known to the Tory politician of fifty years ago than to any world of letters in that day or this. Forty-two extracts from these letters did Courtenay transfer to an Appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly confesses; but not without misgivings as to how they would be received by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. If Courtenay lived to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over dull excerpts from inhuman State papers, we may pity his awakening; but we can never quite forgive the apologetic paragraph with which he relegates Dorothy Osborne's letters to the mouldy obscurity of an Appendix.