[11] Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘CORNHILL.’
Dear Sir,—If it gives Mr. Russell any pleasure to accuse me of ‘living in a happy remoteness from affairs,’ and of having ‘only just awakened from a slumber which seems to have lasted longer than that of Rip Van Winkle,’ it would be cruel of me to object. But the proof of my guilt, it seems, is to be found in the article I wrote in the Cornhill on ‘The Duke of Wellington and Miss J.’ That article, Mr. Russell thinks, proves that I had only just discovered Miss J. and her correspondence with the Duke. As a matter of fact I have been familiar with the volume published by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin for more than twenty years, and it must be fifteen years ago since I wrote an article on the subject in an Australian magazine. But Mr. Russell himself thinks the letters of Miss J. so little known, and so very interesting, that he himself expends another article on them, three months later than mine, and taking exactly the same view of them! It seems clear that there are two Rip Van Winkles—one in England and one in Australia: and the English Van Winkle is even drowsier, and wakes later, than his Australian kinsman.
I should not trouble you with this note, however, except for the opportunity it gives me of apologising for an injustice to Sir Herbert Maxwell which I committed in the article I wrote in the Cornhill. I represented him as saying the Duke ‘must have been inexpressibly bored by the correspondence,’ and the words are in inverted commas, giving the reader the impression these were the exact words Sir Herbert Maxwell used. I apologise for those unfortunate inverted commas. The words they seem to quote were not the precise words Sir Herbert Maxwell used in his ‘Life of Wellington,’ and they do not accurately convey his meaning. ‘The letters,’ he says, ‘some might think were of the very kind to bore the Duke, whose religion was of a somewhat conventional kind.’ But Sir Herbert Maxwell does not say that that was his personal opinion.
Yours truly,
W. H. Fitchett.
Note.—In her article, ‘Dublin Days: the Rising,’ which appeared in my July number, Mrs. Hamilton Norway, on page 51, repeats the current story that Messrs. Jacob were ready to let the military blow up their biscuit factory, for they would never make another biscuit in Ireland. In justice to Messrs. Jacob, let me add that I have since learnt on the one unimpeachable authority that this story, however picturesque, is wholly apocryphal.
The Editor.