LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
Recollections of Writers
Leigh Hunt to Mary Cowden Clarke, 27 April [1844]
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
DOCUMENT INFORMATION
GO TO PAGE NUMBER:
Contents
Preface
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX
John Keats
Charles Lamb
Mary Lamb
Leigh Hunt
Douglas Jerrold
Charles Dickens
Index
Creative Commons License

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Produced by CATH
 
Kensington, April 27th.

Cowdenia mia,—I am afraid you must have thought it very strange, my not sooner answering your kind and most welcome letter with its good news about the Concordance; but we have all been in such a state here with influenza and measles, etc., that a sort of cordon sanitaire was drawn round us, and even the people in Church St. (naturally enough, Heaven knows, considering how they have suffered) were afraid of having anything to do with us, or receiving even a book from us at their doors; so it made us take ourselves for a set of the most plaguey invalids possible, people wholly to be eschewed and eschewing. The girls, however, being at length about and Vincent himself, who has been longest in bed of any, I think we may venture to think of a remote knock at some person’s door; and the consequence is, that here comes to you
252 RECOLLECTIONS OF WRITERS  
and Carlo mio a little book, which has been waiting for you these three weeks. It does not contain quite all that even I would have had inserted; and most unluckily the Nile, and the song which your father set, have got out of it purely by an accident of delay arising out of my wish to improve them. Au reste, I have always regretted that I could not retain that Sonnet to Keats in which Charles was mentioned, because it really was unworthy of both of them; so I have taken an opportunity of mentioning en passant your dear good husband in the Preface. Tell him, if he never saw my Sonnet on the Fish and Man before, I bespeak his regard for it. How rejoiced I was to see the specimen of the Concordance! Item, to hear of the admirable impulse felt by the lady when she heard the Sonnet about the lock of hair. Vide the Rondeau at page 155, for the impulse turned into fact,—a very pretty example, let me tell you, for all honest female friends, especially Cowdenians. I say no more. Verbum sat.; which means a word to the womanly.

Ever dear Charles and Victoria’s
Affectionate friend,
Leigh.