London: November 13, 1856.
I must send a few lines to thank you for the Spenser, which I am very much pleased to have. I am only sorry that the notes are so very unobtrusive.
How is Cambridge? which Lowell reports so changed that he should not have known it. I still retain a dollar note, with the portraiture of the college buildings, flanked by the faces of Judge Story and some other eminence; but all this I suppose, eminences included, will have become obsolete by this time.
Here there is nothing very new, nor anything particularly true, to tell. Until the next French revolution all things will continue. Meantime, omnes omnia mala dicere, we anticipate no good. Charles Norton dines with us this evening, valedictorily.
I have been reading pretty nearly through Crabbe lately. Have you republished Crabbe? If not, you ought to do so. There is no one more purely English (in the Dutch manner), no one who better represents the general result through the country of the last century. His descriptions remind even me of things I used to see and hear of in my boyhood. And sometimes, though rarely, he has really the highest merit, e.g. Ruth, in the ‘Tales of the Hall.’
To Charles Norton, Esq.
London: January 22, 1857.
We are here going on much as usual, occupied with nothing else but commerce and the money market. I do not think anyone is thinking audibly of anything else. Some disaster, perhaps, in the realm of Dost Mahomed may startle us out of our mercantile composure, but at present the only danger we care to think about is that of being garotted, and the main business of the new Parliament will be to see about transportation of possible garotters.
I have read with more pleasure than anything I have seen lately Kane’s ‘Arctic Explorations,’ which is certainly a wonderful story, and the book, moreover, very well got up at Philadelphia. I think I did see Kane at Boston in the spring before he started; I have a distinct image of his figure. The whole narrative is, I think, very characteristic of the difference between the English and the American-English habits of command and obedience.
The first volume of Plutarch is to appear next month. I think the later volumes are much better, or at least less open to criticism. The life of Pericles was wretchedly done in the Dryden, and ought to have been rewritten. Plutarch’s best life is Antony, I think.