Many thanks for your tororesque notices. I have finished the paper,—opus exegi,—having worked incessantly for a fortnight five or six hours a day. The MSS. goes up with this to the printer’s. I have begged him to send you a proof: will you be so kind as to run it over, and forward it here per mail quam primum? Never mind correcting the press, except the Spanish.
The article is long, and I am not afraid of your Excellency’s shears, and will gladly avail myself of any proposed excisions or additions. Any word or idea more pungent than my poor thoughts might be pencilled in the margin. The article is extremely learned and tororesque. I think the old subject is treated newly. I hope Murray will treat me to £36 15s., as gaunt poverty flits about my gilded ceiling. I wish you could see the dining-room, all blue, red, yellow, and green à la Mamhead, very gay and brilliant. Madame is quite well and happy, and salutes your dimidium vitæ animæque. We are going next week for a few days to Sandridge, a place of her brother’s. I shall then hurry back to correct the press. I intend summing up with a few general remarks on the moral tendency and effect on Spanish character produced by the bull-fight. If you have ever philosophically cogitated thereon, favour me with a few “’ints.” My idea is that the Spaniards were cruel and ferocious before they had bull-fights; that bull-fights are rather an effect than a cause, albeit they reciprocate now; that the savage part is lost on them from early habit; that the sporting feeling predominates; and that strangers are hardly fair judges, for they feel first excitement, then bore, then disgust; bore the predominant. Still, the whole is magnificent, though the details (like Paris) are miserable. I should like to have a neat peroration, and am going to meditate on the subject in those shady groves which hang over the clear Dart, where we as bachelors used to toil and catch no fish, and where I caught that fish which has swallowed up all others and all my cares besides.
Spanish Bull-feasts and Bull-fights created something of a sensation in the literary world. It was noticed with high praise in the journals of the time, and Ford writes to thank Addington for an extract which he had himself overlooked.
Heavitree, December 5 [1838].
The critique is so palatable, that I beg you will not think I wrote it myself. Pray, as you will be in franking-land, let me know whence you extracted it. I am delighted. I want people to think that I could, if I wished, write a d—d, long, dry, serious essay, which they would not read. The political pepper flavours the Puchero, and it is exactly that that makes Lockhart write to me that all the world cries “Bravo!”
I am buttered by Murray, and considered a man of deep research. Dii boni! and people regret that I “should persifler, and amuse, instead of boring.”
Ford had undertaken a review of Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella, “an admirable book,” he tells Addington, “the best book ever written by a Yankee.” But he found the task difficult. On February 9th, 1839, he writes to Addington from his mother’s house in London:—
Your letter followed me to this foggy, careworn abode of attorneys, and men who sow tares in the corn of human happiness. I have been up here nearly three weeks, to my infinite worry and the fret of an absent and disconsolate spouse, about mortgages and the devil knows what of my own and my mother. I hope to get back again to my pleasant house et placens uxor before the end of next week.
All these breaks interfere sadly with literary pursuits. The rolling stone gathers no moss. Prescott, promised half a year ago, is not yet begun! In fact, I blink, bolt, shy and jib from the task. Meanwhile, to keep my pen in, I have written a lightish article on Ronda and Granada, which looks well in print, and will come out in the next number, and Prescott in the June number.
I have read Gurwood attentively, which took six weeks, and never were six weeks better employed. Murray tells me that the Duke cut out as much more as would have made six more volumes. What a pity! But they will be printed when that great man is gone. Serus in cœlum redeat!