DEAR Mrs.
Shelley,—At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must
write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who
have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are
gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted
upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are
here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to justify
| 1827 | EMMA ISOLA’S LATIN | 739 |
But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington: I like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine, and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon’s books and Mr. Moxon’s society. Then we shall meet.
I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue commey for: but the damned plot—I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the “Evangely.” I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.
I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book: I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles: to lay in the dead colours,—I’d Titianesque ’em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I’d draw the waters down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my personæ on and off like a Beau Nash; and I’d Frankenstein them there: to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.
I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governessship; which we see no prospect of her getting. ’Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus—his labours were as nothing to it.
Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions; her conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her interjections are purely English “Ah!” and “Oh!” with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine. As I say to her, ass in præsenti rarely makes a wise man in futuro.
But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.
Good-by! Mary’s love.
Yours truly,
