Letter 420 To Miss Hannah More.
Berkeley Square, Feb. 13, 1795. (page 566)
I received your letter and packet of lays and virelays, and heartily wish they may fall in bad ground, and produce a hundred thousand fold, as I doubt is necessary. How I admire the activity of your zeal and perseverance! Should a new church ever be built, I hope in a side chapel there will be an altar dedicated to St. Hannah, Virgin and Martyr; and that Your pen, worn to the bone, will be enclosed in a golden reliquaire, and preserved on the shrine.
These few words I have been forced to dictate, having had the gout ill my right hand above this fortnight; but I trust it is going off The Duchess was much pleased with your writing to her, and ordered me to thank you. Your friend Lady Waldegrave is in town, and looks very well. Adieu, best of women! Yours most cordially.(895)
(895) In a letter to her sister, dated from Fulham Palace, Miss More says,—"Lord Orford has presented me with Bishop Wilson's edition of the Bible, in three volumes quarto, superbly bound in morocco (Oh! that he would himself study that blessed book), to which, in the following most flattering inscription, he attributes my having done far more good than is true—
"To his excellent friend, MISS HANNAH MORE, THE BOOK, which he knows to be the dearest object of her study, and by which, to the great comfort and relief of numberless afflicted and distressed individuals, she has profited beyond any person with whom he is acquainted, is offered, as a mark of his esteem and gratitude, by her sincere and obliged humble servant, Horace, Earl of Orford, 1795."
Letter 421 To William Roscoe, Esq.
Berkeley Square, April 4, 1795. (page 567)
To judge of my satisfaction and gratitude on receiving the very acceptable present of your book,(896) Sir, you should have known my extreme impatience for it from the instant Mr. Edwards had kindly favoured me with the first chapters. You may consequently conceive the mortification I felt at not being able to thank you immediately both for the volume and the obliging letter that accompanied it, by my right arm and hand being swelled and rendered quite immovable and useless, of which you will perceive the remains if you can read these lines which I am forcing myself to write, not without pain, the first moment I have power to hold 'a pen; and it will cost me some time, I believe, before I can finish my whole letter, earnest as I am, Sir, to give a loose to my gratitude.
If you ever had the pleasure of reading such a delightful book as your own, imagine, Sir, what a comfort it must be to receive such an anodyne in the midst of a fit of the gout that has already lasted above nine weeks, and which at first I thought might carry me to Lorenzo de' Medici before he should come to me.
The complete volume has more than answered the expectations which the sample had raised. The Grecian simplicity of the style is preserved throughout; the same judicious candour reigns in every page; and without allowing yourself that liberty of indulging your own bias towards good or against criminal characters, which over-rigid critics prohibit, your artful candour compels your readers to think with you, without seeming to take a part yourself. You have shown from his own virtues, abilities, and heroic spirit, why Lorenzo deserved to have Mr. Roscoe for his biographer. And since you have been so, Sir, (for he was not completely known before, at least out of Italy,) I shall be extremely mistaken if he is not henceforth allowed to be, in various lights, one of the most excellent and greatest men with whom we are well acquainted, especially if we reflect on the shortness of his life and the narrow sphere in which he had to act. Perhaps I ought to blame my own ignorance, that I did not know Lorenzo as a beautiful poet: I confess I did not. Now I do, I own I admire some of his sonnets more than several-yes, even of Petrarch; for Lorenzo's are frequently more clear, less alembiquis, and not inharmonious as Petrarch's often are from being too crowded with words, for which room is made by numerous elisions, which prevent the softening alternacy of vowels and consonants. That thicket of words was occasioned by the embarrassing nature of the sonnet: a form of composition I do not love, and which is almost intolerable in any language but Italian, which furnishes such a profusion of rhymes. To our tongue the sonnet is mortal, and the parent of insipidity. The Mutation in some degree of it was extremely noxious to a true poet, our Spenser; and he was the more injudicious by lengthening his stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as ours, and in which several words, whose terminations are of similar sounds, are so rugged, uncouth, and unmusical. The consequence was, that many lines which he forced into the service to complete the quota of his stanza are unmeaning, or silly, or tending to weaken the thought he would express.
Well, Sir: but if you have led me to admire the compositions of Lorenzo, you have made me intimate with another poet, of whom I had never heard nor had the least suspicion; and who, though writing in a less harmonious language than Italian, outshines an able master of that country, as may be estimated by the fairest of all comparisons -which is, when one of each nation versifies the same ideas and thoughts. That novel poet I boldly pronounce is Mr. Roscoe. Several of his translations of' Lorenzo are superior to the originals, and the verses more poetic; nor am I bribed to give this opinion by the present of your book, nor by any partiality, nor by the surprise of finding so pure a writer of history as able a poet. Some good judges to whom I have shown your translations entirely agree with me. I will name one most competent judge, Mr. Hoole, so admirable a poet himself, and such a critic in Italian, as he has proved by a translation of Ariosto. That I am not flattering you, Sir, I will demonstrate; for I am not satisfied with one essential line in your version of the most beautiful, I think, of all Lorenzo's stanzas. It is his description of Jealousy, in page 268, equal, in my humble opinion, to Dryden's delineations of the Passions, and the last line of which is—