One of Teixeira’s last letters (19.8.20) from Crowborough contained a translation of the terms (already quoted) in which Couperus congratulated him on his version of The Tour:
Couperus writes:
“Your last envoi has given me a most delightful day. What a magnificent translation. The Tour is; what a most charming little book it has become! I am in raptures over it and read and reread it all day and have had tears in my eyes and have laughed over it. You may think it silly of me to say all this; but it has become an exquisitely beautiful work in its English form. My warmest congratulations!...
“Thank McKenna for his assistance: the hymn has become very fine. For that matter the whole book is a gem, if I may say so myself.”
So I’ve had one appreciative reader at any rate!...
On 27.8.20 he adds:
Tell Norman [Major Holden, then liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight] that, should there be an election in “the island” before I leave Ventnor, he’ll find me both able and ready to impersonate the oldest inhabitant and gallop to the polling-station, in my bath-chair, and vote for him....
And, finally, in praise of toleration:
31 August 1920 (being the birthday of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands).
It won’t do to insist on this racial aspect of things. I was never of those who called L. G. a damned little Welsh solicitor. He would have been just the same had he been Scotch or English or Irish. After all, our friend R. is little and Welsh and was a solicitor and will as likely as not be damned if he doesn’t join his wife’s church. And there is the converse case, when you hear men describing an outrage committed by Englishmen as “unenglish.” How can the things be unenglish which the English do?