Memoir of John Murray
Henry Hart Milman to John Murray, 5 March 1832
Reading, March 5th, 1832.
My dear Sir,
I have been utterly inefficient for the last week, in a state
of almost complete blindness; but am now, I trust,
* Mr.
Disraeli was then a candidate, on the Radical side, for
the Borough of Wycombe. |
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| 338 | MEMOIRS OF JOHN MURRAY | |
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nearly restored. Mrs.
Milman, however, has read to me the whole of the MS. It is a
very remarkable production—very wild, very extravagant, very German, very
powerful, very poetical. It will, I think, be much read—as far as one
dare predict anything of the capricious taste of the day—much admired,
and much abused. It is much more in the Macaulay than in the Croker line, and the former is evidently in the ascendant. Some
passages will startle the rigidly orthodox; the phrenologists will be in
rapture. I tell you all this, that you may judge for yourself. One thing insist
upon, if you publish it—that the title be changed. The whole beauty, of
the latter part especially, is its truth. It is a rapid volume of travels, a
‘Childe Harold’
in prose; therefore do not let it be called “a Romance” on any
account. Let those who will, believe it to be a real history, and those who are
not taken in, dispute whether it is truth or fiction. If it makes any
sensation, this will add to its notoriety ‘A Psychological
Auto-Biography’ would be too sesquipedalian a title; but ‘My Life
Psychologically Related,’ or ‘The Psychology of my Life,’ or
some such title, might be substituted.
John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)
Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the
Quarterly
Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's
Life of
Johnson (1831).
Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868)
Educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, he was a poet, historian and dean of St
Paul's (1849) who wrote for the
Quarterly Review.
