To Charles Keene. [280a]
Friday.
My dear Keene,
. . . Beckford’s Hunting is an old friend of mine: excellently written; such a relief (like Wesley and the religious men) to the Essayist style of the time. Do not fail to read the capital Squire’s Letter in recommendation of a Stable-man, dated from Great Addington, Northants, 1734: of which some little is omitted after Edition I.; which edition has also a Letter from Beckford’s Huntsman about a wicked ‘Daufter,’ wholly omitted. This first Edition is a pretty small 4to 1781, with a Frontispiece by Cipriani! . . .
If you come down this Spring, but not before May, I will show you some of these things in a Book [280b] I have, which I might call ‘Half Hours with the Worst Authors,’ and very fine things by them. It would be the very best Book of the sort ever published,
if published; but no one would think so but myself, and perhaps you, and half a dozen more. If my Eyes hold out I will copy a delightful bit by way of return for your Ballad.
To C. E. Norton.
May 1, 1880.
My dear Norton,
I must thank you for the Crabbe Review [281] you sent me, though, had it been your own writing, I should probably not tell you how very good I think it. I am somewhat disappointed that Mr. Woodberry dismisses Crabbe’s ‘Trials at Humour’ as summarily as Mr. Leslie Stephen does; it was mainly for the Humour’s sake that I made my little work: Humour so evident to me in so many of the Tales (and Conversations), and which I meant to try and get a hearing for in the short Preface I had written in case the Book had been published. I thought these Tales showed the ‘stern Painter’ softened by his Grand Climacteric, removed from the gloom and sadness of his early associations, and looking to the Follies rather than to the Vices of Men, and treating them often in something of a Molière way, only with some pathetic humour mixt, so as these Tales were almost the only one of his Works which left an agreeable impression behind them. But if so good a Judge as