When you were to start for Spain, I was thinking what a hot time of it you would have there: in Madrid too, I suppose, worst of all, I have heard. But you have Titian and Velasquez to refresh you. Cervantes too is not far. We have here (some two or three years old) a Book ‘Untrodden Spain’; unaffectedly and pleasantly written by some Clergyman, Rose, who lived chiefly among the mining folk. But there is a Chapter in Vol. 2 entitled ‘[El] Pajaro,’ and giving account of a day’s sport with [Pedro the Barber] who carries a Decoy Bird, which is as another Chapter to Don Quixote. Ah! I look at him on my Shelf, and know that I can take him down when I
will, and that I shall do so many a time before 1878 if I live. . . .
Tell me something of the Spanish Drama, Lope, or Calderon. I think you could get one acted by Virtue of your Office.
Woodbridge. [October, 1877.]
My dear Sir—(which I will exchange for your own name if you will set me Example).
You see I write to you; but do not expect any answer from the midst of all your Business. But I have lately been re-reading—(at that same old Dunwich, too)—those Essays of yours on which you wished to see my ‘Adversaria.’ These are too few and insignificant to specify by Letter: when you return to English-speaking World, you shall, if you please, see my Copy, or Copies, marked with a Query at such places as I stumbled at. Were not the whole so really admirable, both in Thought and Diction, I should not stumble at such Straws; such Straws as you can easily blow away if you should ever care to do so. Only, pray understand (what I really mean) that, in all my remarks, I do not pretend to the level of an original Writer like yourself: only as a Reader of Taste, which is a very different thing you know, however useful now and then in the Service of Genius. I am accredited with the Aphorism, ‘Taste is the Feminine of Genius.’ However that may be, I have some confidence in my
own. And, as I have read these Essays of yours more than once and again, and with increasing Satisfaction, so I believe will other men long after me; not as Literary Essays only, but comprehending very much beside of Human and Divine, all treated with such a very full and universal Faculty, both in Thought and Word, that I really do not know where to match in any work of the kind. I could make comparisons with the best: but I don’t like comparisons. But I think your Work will last, as I think of very few Books indeed. You are yet two good years from sixty (Mr. Norton tells me), and have yet at least a dozen more of Dryden’s later harvest: pray make good use of it: Cervantes, at any rate, I think to live to read, though one of your great merits is, not being in a hurry: and so your work completes itself. But I nearer seventy than you sixty. . . .
You should get Dryden’s Prefaces published separately in America, with your own remarks on them, and also Johnson’s very fine praise: in which he praises Dryden for those unexpected turns in which he himself is so deficient. But pray love old Johnson, a little more than I think you do. We have, you may know, a rather clumsy Edition of this Dryden Prose in four 8vo volumes by Malone; the first volume all Life and a few Letters. I have bought some three or four Copies of this work, more or less worse for wear, to give away: one extra Copy, much the worse for wear, on a back shelf now, waiting its destination. No
English Publisher, I suppose, would do this work, unless under some great name: perhaps under yours, if your own Country were not the fitter place. As in the case of your Essays, I don’t pretend to say which is finest: but I think that to me Dryden’s Prose, quoad Prose, is the finest Style of all. So Gray, I believe, thought: that man of Taste, very far removed, perhaps as far as feminine from masculine, from the Man he admired.
Your Wordsworth should introduce any future Edition of him, as I think some of Ste. Beuve’s Essays do some of his men. He rarely, you know, gets beyond French.