Geldestone, Jan. 13/48.
My dear Cowell,
. . . I suppose you have seen Carlyle’s thirty-five Cromwell letters in Fraser. I see the Athenæum is picking holes with them too: and I certainly had a misgiving that Squire of Yarmouth must have pieced out the erosions of ‘the vermin’ by one or two hotheaded guesses of his own. But I am sure, both from the general matter of the letters, and from Squire’s own bodily presence, that he did not forge them. Carlyle has made a bungle of the whole business;
and is fairly twitted by the Athenæum for talking so loud about his veneration for Cromwell, etc., and yet not stirring himself to travel a hundred miles to see and save such memorials as he talks of.
Boulge, Wednesday.
[Jan. 25, 1848.]
My dear Cowell,
I liked your paper on the Mesnavi [232] very much; both your criticism and your Mosaic legend. That I may not seem to give you careless and undistinguishing praise, I will tell you that I could not quite hook on the latter part of Moses to the former; did you leave out any necessary link of the chain in the hiatus you made? or is the inconsequence only in my brains? So much for the legend: and I must reprehend you for one tiny bit of Cockney about Memory’s rosary at the end of your article, which, but for that, I liked so much.
So judges Fitz-Dennis; who, you must know by this time, has the judgment of Molière’s old woman, and the captiousness of Dennis. Ten years ago I might have been vext to see you striding along in Sanscrit and Persian so fast; reading so much; remembering all; writing about it so well. But now I am glad to see any man do any thing well; and I know that it is my vocation to stand and wait, and know within myself whether it is done well.
I have just finished, all but the last three chapters, the fourth Book of Thucydides, and it is now no task to me to go on. This fourth book is the most interesting I have read; containing all that blockade of Pylos; that first great thumping of the Athenians at Oropus, after which they for ever dreaded the Theban troops. And it came upon me ‘come stella in ciel,’ when, in the account of the taking of Amphipolis, [233] Thucydides, ος ταυτα ξυνεyραψεν, comes with seven ships to the rescue! Fancy old Hallam sticking to his gun at a Martello tower! This was the way to write well; and this was the way to make literature respectable. Oh, Alfred Tennyson, could you but have the luck to be put to such employment! No man would do it better; a more heroic figure to head the defenders of his country could not be.
To S. Laurence.