10 July, 1835.
1 Lloyds Place, Blackheath.
My Dear Friend:
A thousand thanks for your kind letter and all the kind things it contains. I am glad that you like my friend the Gipsey, because your approval is worth much and though I think it tolerable myself, yet I have attributed a great part of its success to the name. In answer to the question you put, I do not think he was drowned; but I do not know with certainty. I have told all I do know and farther this deponent sayeth not. I have long been thinking of writing to you to tell you that the name of Chaucer appears in the Scroop and Grosvenor roll in the year 1386 but all that I dare say you know. The best sketch of the real events of Chaucer’s life is certainly that in Sir H. Nicholas’ comments on that roll, Vol. II., page 404, wherein he probably states all that can be learned with certainty of his life and proceedings. I tell you all this, although I dare say you are already acquainted with it because you asked me if I found any thing concerning our poet to let you know. The Black Prince comes on but slowly. So much examination and research is necessary that it is a most laborious and very expensive work. It has already cost me in journeys, transcriptions, books, MSS., &c., many hundred pounds without at all calculating my individual labour and do you know, my dear Allan, what I expect as my reward. Clear loss; and two or three reviews written by ignorant blockheads upon a subject they do not understand, for the purpose of damning a work which throws some new light upon English History. I am very much out of spirits in regard to historical literature and though I would willingly devote my time and even my money to elucidate the dark points of our own history yet encouragement from the public is small and from the Government does not exist, so that I lay down the pen in despair of ever seeing English history any thing but what it is—a farrago of falsehoods and hypotheses covered over with the tinsel of specious reasoning from wrong data. And so you tell Lord Melbourne when you see him. But to speak of a personage, you are more likely to see namely Mr. Chantry. There is a bust which I wish him very much to see and wish you would take a look at it first as I have not seen the original myself. I have a cast of it given me by my Banker at Florence, to whom the original belongs, and if the head be equal to the cast it is the most beautiful antique I have ever seen. It is to be seen at Mr. Brown’s in University Street, Gower Street marble works. Ask to see the antique head belonging to Mr. Johnstone and write me but three lines to tell me what you think of it. He paid, I believe, two hundred pounds for it and would take I believe three or four. If it be as I think, it (pedestal and all) is worth double.
Yours ever with best Compliments to your family
G. P. R. James
Excuse a scrawl but I am not very well.
1 Lloyds Place, Blackheath
5th Decr 1835
My Dear Allan,—I have sent you a book and have ten times the pleasure in sending you one now that ever I had, because I hear you have detached yourself from all reviews. Heaven be praised therefor; for now you can sit down quietly by your own ingle nook and pick out all that is good—if there be any—in my One in a Thousand and palate it all, without the prospect, the damning prospect, of a broad sheet and small print before your eyes, and without wracking your honest brain to find out any small glimmerings of wit and wisdom in your friend’s book in order to set it forth as fairly as may be to the carping world.