I got your letter ten days ago in London on my way here. We have
incessant rain, which is as bad as your sciroccos; at least it damps my
energies very much. But people are accustomed to it in Ireland: and my
uncle (in whose house I am staying) is just set off with three of his
children--on horseback--cantering and laughing away in the midst of a
hopeless shower. I am afraid some of us are too indolent for such
things.
I am glad Morton has taken up painting in good earnest, and I shall
encourage him to persevere as much as I can. . . . I have begun to draw
a little--the fit comes upon one in summer with the foliage: as to
sunshine, so necessary for pictures, I have been obliged to do without
that. We have had scarce a ray for a month . . . I have read nothing,
except the Annual Register: which is not amiss in a certain state of
mind, and is not easily exhausted. A goodly row of some hundred very
thick volumes which may be found in every country town wherever one goes
forbid all danger of exhaustion. So long as there is appetite, there is
food: and of that plain substantial nature which, Johnson says, suits the
stomach of middle life. Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical
politician to interest one just when one's sonneteering age is departing,
but before one has come down quite to arid fact. Do you know anything of
poor Sir Egerton Brydges?--this, in talking of sonnets--poor fellow, he
wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only
lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire
them also. He lived in haughty seclusion, and at the end of life wrote a
doating Autobiography. He writes good prose however, and shews himself
as he is very candidly: indeed he is proud of the display.
All this is not meant to be a lesson to you who write, everybody says,
good sonnets. Sir E. Brydges would have been the same dilettante if he
had written Epics--probably worse. I certainly don't like sonnets, as
you know: we have been spoiled for them by Daddy Wordsworth, ---, and Co.
Moxon must write them too forsooth. What do they seem fit for but to
serve as little shapes in which a man may mould very mechanically any
single thought which comes into his head, which thought is not lyrical
enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical measure? The difficulty of
the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic
thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no
danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither
prose nor poetry. I have rather a wish to tie old Wordsworth's volume
about his neck and pitch him into one of the deepest holes of his dear
Duddon.
But it is very stupid to write all this to Italy, though it would have
done very well to have canvassed with you and Morton over our pipes in
Mornington Crescent. I suppose you never will come back to stay long in
England again: I have given you up to a warmer latitude. If you were
more within reach, I would make you go a trip with me to the West of
Ireland, whither I am not confident enough to go alone. Yet I wish to
see it.
_To Bernard Barton_.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN,
_September_ 2/41.