“I have just read the gratifying support your eloquent pen has given to my ‘Last Saxon,’ and I cannot delay cordially thanking you. I am the more gratified as you have pointed out so clearly, what appeared to me obvious, that the introduction of the ‘Witches’ was not needless, but in strict consonance with the cast and character given to William, and with the storms and earthquake, &c, as well as for poetical light and shade, which beings of this description give to poetical narrative. One of the critical school of Etourdi asked me, Cui inserviunt?
“Your observations on the divided interest in the last
book, are most accurate and judicious. If I have a second edition, which I
think your account sufficient to promise, this will be obviated,—by detaching
Marcus from that scene entirely, and if
I had had the advantage of consulting any one so judicious, or indeed had
myself considered it, I could not only have prevented this conflict of
sympathies, in this place, but have given additional effect to the narrative,
by letting Marcus stay, where history
places him,
| 150 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
“Oh! te Bowleane, cerebri!” |
“You are equally right, I think, after consideration, in what you say of the songs of Editha, not being in character. In fact, a pastoral air was designedly given to them, as relief to the storm, darkness, and supernatural ideas. I thought there was ‘something too much of this,’ and that it wanted ‘breaking,’ and the songs are supposed to be reminiscences of happier days. I hope to have an opportunity of showing my respect for your opinion by altering the cast of character in them.
“With respect to the line you marked as not musical, it certainly was made as it stands designedly; a more obvious melody would be
“Toiling, from corse to corse, they trod in blood.”
|
“The part which I myself considered the most effective
in the poem, was the introduction of William in the abbey,
| PINDAR, HOGG, BOWLES. | 151 |
“Mihi me reddentis agel—” (broken off by the seal). |
“Dear sir, most sincerely your obedient servant,
“Except, when I wrote a poem anonymously, I have never had a warm word from any critic in my life, but my little boat, somehow or other, has got on, in defiance of cockney-taste or cockney-animosity, and the guarded silence of the Duo fulmina, the ‘Quarterly, and Edinburgh.’ This I attribute to the steadiness with which I hope I have steered between the Scylla and Charybdis of modern taste, false simplicity, and affected tawdriness of ornament, with eye never removed from the models of the Greek έπιγραμματα, which I first proposed to myself as the only examples. I am prepared for something vindictive in the ‘Quarterly,’ of which D’Israeli of the ‘golden-silvery-diamond-eye’ firing ‘silver-circled-silver-shining’ style is the
* Mr. and Mrs. Bowles educated and clothed nearly all the poorer class of children in the parish of Bremhill. It was a most gratifying sight to see them fêted on the lawn in front of the beautiful mansion on a fine summer day. At a very short distance the Marchioness of Lansdowne was earnestly fulfilling a similar charity for the children around Bowood; and Tom Moore, at Sloperton, between the two, thus had visions of a more bountiful and better world than he had painted in his biting satires.—W. J. |
| 152 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
