"Yes," said Sir James, "those troubles are as old as the hills. Don't you recollect the lines Horace wrote two thousand years ago?" and he quoted them.
"Splendid! I wish you would write them down for me; my Latin is rather rusty, and I should like to remember them."
So he wrote:—
| Horace, 3rd Satire. |
| "Omnibus hoc vitium |
| Est cantoribus, inter amicos |
| Ut nunquam inducant |
| Animum cantare |
| rogati |
| Injussi nunquam |
| desistant." |
The same day Browning came in, and seeing the lines, he took up a pen and wrote without pausing to think—
| "All sorts of singers have this common vice: |
| To sing 'mid friends you have to ask them twice! |
| If you don't ask them, that's another thing: |
| Until the judgment-day be sure they'll sing! |
| —Impromptu Translation, July 10, '83." |
How rapidly his mind worked I had occasional opportunities of witnessing. He would let us give him a number of rhymes, perhaps twenty or thirty, to be embodied in an impromptu poem. This he would read to us just once, and, as he spoke the last words, he would ruthlessly tear it up into small fragments and scatter them to the winds. Nothing would induce him to stay his iconoclastic hand, and on such occasions it only remained for me to regret that I was not some sensitive plate, some uncanny Edisonian Poetophone, to preserve the spontaneous creation of his mind.
"Do you ever listen to Reciters?" my wife asked him one day; "I mean to Reciters of Browning's poems?"
"Oh, I do the Reciting myself," he said, "when I am amongst a few sympathetic friends. I will read to you with pleasure. What have you got?"
The few sympathetic ones were not wanting that Sunday afternoon; I gave him the volume of "Selections" from his poems, and turning over the pages he said, "As we are in an artist's studio, I will read 'Andrea del Sarto.'"