Boulge, Jan. 29/45.
My dear Donne,
. . . A. T. has near a volume of poems—elegiac—in memory of Arthur Hallam. Don’t you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now? Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should reach. But Spedding praises: and I suppose the elegiacs will see daylight, public daylight, one day. Carlyle goes on growling with his Cromwell: whom he finds more and more faultless every day. So that his paragon also will one day see the light also, an elegiac of a different kind from Tennyson’s; as far apart indeed as Cromwell and Hallam.
Barton comes and sups with me to-morrow, and George Crabbe, son of the poet, a capital fellow.
Boulge, Woodbridge, Feby. 6, 1845.
My dear Frederic,
. . . You like to hear of men and manners. Have I not been to London for a whole fortnight, seen Alfred, Spedding, all the lawyers and all the painters, gone to Panoramas of Naples by Volcano-light (Vesuvius in a blaze illuminating the whole bay, which Morton says is not a bit better than Plymouth Sound, if you could put a furnace in the belly of Mount Edgecumbe)—gone to see the Antigone of Messrs. Sophocles and Mendelssohn at Covent Garden—gone to see the Infant Thalia—now as little of an Infant as a Thalia—at the Adelaide Gallery. So! you see things go on as when you were with us. Only the Thalia has waxed in stature: and perhaps in wisdom also: but that is not in her favour. The Antigone is, as you are aware, a neatly constructed drama, on the French model; the music very fine, I thought—but you would turn up your nose at it, I dare say. It was horribly ill sung, by a chorus in shabby togas, who looked much more like dirty bakers than Theban (were they?) respectable old gentlemen. Mr. Vandenhoff sat on a marble camp-stool in the middle, and looked like one of Flaxman’s Homeric Kings—very well. And Miss Vandenhoff did Antigone. I forget the name of the lady who did Ismene; [189] perhaps you
would have thought her very handsome: but I did not, nor was she considered at all remarkable, as far as I could make out. I saw no pantomimes: and all the other theatres were filled with Balfe, whom perhaps you admire very much. So I won’t say anything about him till you have told me what you think on his score. . . .
Well and have you read ‘Eothen’ which all the world talks of? And do you know who it is written by? . . . Then Eliot Warburton has written an Oriental Book! Ye Gods! In Shakespeare’s day the nuisance was the Monsieur Travellers who had ‘swum in a gundello’; but now the bores are those who have smoked tschibouques with a Peshaw! Deuce take it: I say ’tis better to stick to muddy Suffolk.