My friend Mrs. Meynell has obliged me with a few words of introduction
to this letter by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, here printed for the first
time in an edition of twenty-five copies. It was written when she was
twenty-one years of age, and residing at her father’s house near Ledbury
in Herefordshire. She did not meet Robert Browning until nineteen years
later, but her girlish enthusiasm for poetry is reflected in this
letter. Her correspondent, Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), did not live
to see her recognition as a great poet, although her _Essay on Mind_ was
published when she was nineteen and her _Battle of Marathon_, published
in our day, was written at the age of fourteen. Price was a
Herefordshire neighbour. He was a schoolfellow of Charles James Fox at
Eton. He had great ideas on gardening, and developed them in his own
grounds at Foxley and wrote an _Essay on the Picturesque_ in 1784,
enlarged afterwards into a three-volume work. Sir Walter Scott utilised
Price’s ideas when he laid out the gardens at Abbotsford. Price was
created a baronet in 1828. Letters from him are to be found in Miss
Berry’s _Journals_. Miss Barrett’s letter was doubtless inspired by
Uvedale Price’s _An Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of Greek and
Latin_, which he had had privately printed at Oxford in the year 1827. I
have not seen the book, a copy of which he doubtless gave to his fair
neighbour. Its perusal served, I am sure, to explain certain obscure
allusions in the letter. It urged that “our system of pronouncing the
ancient languages is at variance with the principles and established
rules of ancient prosody and the practice of the best poets.”