12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
March 11/77.
. . . I scarce like your taking any pains about my Works, whether in Verse, Prose, or Music. I never see any Paper but my old Athenæum, which, by the way, now tells me of some Lady’s Edition of Omar which is to discover all my Errors and Perversions. So this will very likely turn the little Wind that blew my little Skiff on. Or the Critic who incautiously helped that may avenge himself on Agamemnon King, as he pleases. If the Pall Mall Critic knew Greek, I am rather surprised he should have vouchsafed even so much praise as the words
you quoted. But I certainly have found that those few whom I meant it for, not Greek scholars, have been more interested in it than I expected. Not you, I think, who, though you judge only too favourably of all I do, are not fond of such Subjects.
I have here two Volumes of my dear Sévigné’s Letters lately discovered at Dijon; and I am writing out for my own use a Dictionary of the Dramatis Persons figuring in her Correspondence, whom I am always forgetting and confounding.
* * * * *
In May 1877 his old boatman West died and FitzGerald wrote to Professor Cowell, ‘I have not had heart to go on our river since the death of my old Companion West, with whom I had traversed reach after reach for these dozen years. I am almost as averse to them now as Peter Grimes. [217] So now I content myself with the River Side.’
To W. A. Wright.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
June 23/77.
My dear Wright,
. . . I have been regaling myself, in my unscholarly way, with Mr. Munro’s admirable Lucretius. Surely, it must be one of the most admirable Editions