Now, as I see my Paper draws short, I turn from your Works to those of ‘The Great Twalmley,’ viz.: the Dialogue I mentioned, and you ask for. I really got it out: but, on reading it again after many years, was so much disappointed even in the little I expected that I won’t send it to you, or any one more. It is only eighty 12 mo pages, and about twenty too long, and the rest over-pointed (Oh Cervantes!), and all somewhat antiquated. But the Form of it is pretty: and the little Narrative part: and one day I may strike out, etc., and make you a present of a pretty Toy. But it won’t do now.
I have at last bid Adieu to poor old Dunwich: the Robin singing in the Ivy that hangs on those old Priory walls. A month ago I wrote to ask
Carlyle’s Niece about her Uncle, and telling her of this Priory, and how her Uncle would once have called me Dilettante; all which she read him; he only said ‘Poor, Poor old Priory!’ She says he is very well, and abusing V. Hugo’s ‘Misérables.’ I have been reading his Cromwell, and not abusing it. You tell all the Truth about him.
To C. E. Norton.
Woodbridge. October 28/77.
My dear Sir (‘Norton’ I will write in my next if you will anticipate me by a reciprocal Familiarity).
I wish I had some English Life, Woodbridge, or other, to send you: but Woodbridge, I sometimes say, is as Pompeii, in that respect; and I know little of the World beyond but what a stray Newspaper tells me. So I must get back to my Friends on the Shelf.
Thence I lately took down Mr. Lowell’s (I have proposed to un-mister him too), Lowell’s Essays, and carried them with me to that old Dunwich, which I suppose I shall see no more this year. Robin Redbreast—have you him?—was piping in the Ivy along the Walls; and, under them, Blackberries ripening from stems which those old Grey Friars picked from. And I had the Essays abroad, and within doors; and marked with a Query some words, or sentences, which
I stumbled at: which I should not have stumbled at had all the rest not been such capital Reading. I really believe I know not, on the whole, any such Essays, of that kind: and that a very comprehensive kind, both in Subject, and Treatment. I think he settles many Questions that every one discusses: and on which a Final Verdict is what we now want. I believe the Books will endure: and that is why I want a few blemishes, as I presume to think them, removed: and the Author is to see my Pencil marks, when he returns to England, or to her ‘Gigantic Daughter of the West.’ I hope he will live to write many more such Books: Cervantes, first of all!
I have also been reading Carlyle’s Cromwell: which I think will last also, and so carry along with it many of his more perishable tirades. I don’t know indeed if his is the Final Verdict on Oliver: or on so many of the subordinate Characters whom he sketches in so confidently. A shrewd Man is he; but it is not so easy to judge of men by a few stray hints of them in Books. A quaint instance of this Carlyle himself supplied me with, in his total misapprehension of his hitherto unseen Correspondent ‘Squire,’ who burned the Cromwell Diary. I was the intelligent Friend who interviewed Squire; as unlike as might be in Age, Person, and Character, to the Man Carlyle had prefigured from his Letters. One day I will send you the little Correspondence between T. C. and