which I sent to Mitford, to try and give the Book a little move: but Mitford had just quitted the Gentleman’s Magazine, and I tore up my Paper. Your Elizabeth knows (I think) all about this Lady: who, I suppose, is connected with Lincolnshire: for the Reviewer speaks of some of the Poems as relating to that Coast—Shipwrecks, etc. I was told that Tennyson was writing a sort of Lincolnshire Idyll: I will bet on Miss Ingelow now: he should never have left his old County, and gone up to be suffocated by London Adulation. He has lost that which caused the long roll of the Lincolnshire Wave to reverberate in the measure of Locksley Hall. Don’t believe that I rejoice like a Dastard in what I believe to be the Decay of a Great Man: my sorrow has been so much about it that (for one reason) I have the less cared to meet him of late years, having nothing to say in sincere praise. Nor do I mean that his Decay is all owing to London, etc. He is growing old: and I don’t believe much in the Fine Arts thriving on an old Tree: I can’t think Milton’s Paradise Lost so good as his Allegro, etc.; one feels the strain of the Pump all through: only Shakespeare—the exception to all rule—struck out Macbeth at past fifty. [47a]
By the way, there is a new—and the best—edition [47b] of Him coming out: edited by two men (Fellows) of Cambridge. Just the Text, with the various readings of Folio and Quartos: scarce any notes: but suggestions of Alteration from Pope, Theobald, Coleridge,
etc., and—Spedding; who (as I told him twenty years ago) should have done the work these men are doing. He also says they are well doing about half what is wanted to be done. He should—for he could—have done all; and one Frontispiece Portrait would have served for Author and Editor.
Come—here is a long Letter—and (as I read it over) with more Go than usually attends my old Pen now. Let it inspire you to answer: never mind the Birds:—which really suggests to me one of Dante’s beautiful lines which made me cry the other Day at Sea.
Mentre che gli occhi per la fronda verde
Ficcava io così, come far suole
Chi dietro all’ uccellin la vita perde,
Lo più che Padre mi dicea, etc. [48a]
To W. B. Donne.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
October 4/63.
My dear Donne,
Very rude of me not to have acknowledged your Tauchnitz [48b] before: but I have been almost living in my Ship ever since: and I supposed also that you were abroad in Norfolk. I pitied you undergoing those dreadful Oratorios: I never heard one that was not tiresome, and in part ludicrous. Such subjects are scarce fitted for Catgut. Even Magnus Handel—even
Messiah. He (Handel) was a good old Pagan at heart, and (till he had to yield to the fashionable Piety of England) stuck to Opera, and Cantatas, such as Acis and Galatea, Milton’s Penseroso, Alexander’s Feast, etc., where he could revel and plunge and frolic without being tied down to Orthodoxy. And these are (to my mind) his really great works: these, and his Coronation Anthems, where Human Pomp is to be accompanied and illustrated