Woodbridge, Nov. 20.
My dear Pollock,
I am glad the Rogers Verses [144] gratified you. I forget where I saw them quoted, some ten years ago; but as I had long wished for them myself, and thought others might wish for them also, I got them reprinted here in the form I sent you. . . . I have no compunction at all in reviving this Satire upon the old Banker, whom it is only paying off in his own Coin. Spedding (of course) used to deny that R. deserved his ill Reputation: but I never heard any one else deny it. All his little malignities, unless the epigram on Ward be his, are dead along with his little sentimentalities; while Byron’s Scourge hangs over his Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in her Letters; her excellent Letters, so far as I can see
and judge, next best to Walpole and Cowper in our Language. . . .
I have bought Regnard, of the old Molière times, very good; and (what is always odd to me) as French as the French of To-day: I mean, in point of Language.
[Nov. 1872.]
My dear Pollock,
In a late Box of books which I had from Mudie were Macmillan and Fraser, for 1869-1870. And in one of these—I am nearly sure, Macmillan—is an Article called ‘Objects of Art’ [145] which treats very well, I think, on the subject you and I talked of at Whitsun. . . .
My new Reader . . . has been reading to me Fields’ ‘Yesterdays with Authors,’ Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray. The latter seems to me a Caricature: the Dickens has one wonderful bit about Macready in 1869, which ought not to have been printed during his Life, but which I will copy out for you if you have not seen it. Hawthorne seems to me the most of a Man of Genius America has produced in the way of Imagination: yet I have never found an Appetite for his Books. Frederic Tennyson sent me Victor Hugo’s ‘Toilers of the Sea,’ which he admires, I suppose; but I can’t get up an Appetite for that neither. I think the Scenes being laid in the Channel Islands