Little Grange, Woodbridge.
[July 4/74.]
My dear Laurence,
. . . I am (for a wonder) going out on a few days’ visit. . . . And, once out, I meditate a run to Edinburgh, only to see where Sir Walter Scott lived and wrote about. But as I have meditated this great Enterprize for these thirty years, it may perhaps now end again in meditation only. . . .
I am just finishing Forster’s Dickens: very good, I think: only, he has no very nice perception of Character, I think, or chooses not to let his readers into it. But there is enough to show that Dickens
was a very noble fellow as well as a very wonderful one. . . . I, for one, worship Dickens, in spite of Carlyle and the Critics: and wish to see his Gadshill as I wished to see Shakespeare’s Stratford and Scott’s Abbotsford. One must love the Man for that.
To W. F. Pollock.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
July 23, [1874].
But I did get to Abbotsford, and was rejoiced to find it was not at all Cockney, not a Castle, but only in the half-castellated style of heaps of other houses in Scotland; the Grounds simply and broadly laid out before the windows, down to a field, down to the Tweed, with the woods which he left so little, now well aloft and flourishing, and I was glad. I could not find my way to Maida’s Grave in the Garden, with its false Quantity,
Ad jănuam Domini, etc.
which the Whigs and Critics taunted Scott with, and Lockhart had done it. ‘You know I don’t care a curse about what I write’; nor about what was imputed to him. In this, surely like Shakespeare: as also in other respects. I will worship him, in spite of Gurlyle, who sent me an ugly Autotype of Knox whom I was to worship instead.