alleged a 'deficiency in strength' or the lack of time
and transport; but, later, she was obliged to confess that her father had decided that for a 'young female' to visit a literary recluse, despite the fact that he was blind, middle-aged and respectably married, would be an unpardonable contravention of the 'established observances of society.' Then, during the spring of 1828, Mr. Barrett revoked his ban; Elizabeth arrived at Ruby Cottage—after a terrifying adventure in a runaway pony carriage; and, on May 16, master and disciple, both impassioned students of Greek poetry, sat down together to construe and admire the opening passages of the cEdipus.
The firm friendship that now sprang up lasted without inter- ruption from 1827 until. 1847; and those twenty years saw a revolu- tionary change in the disciple's private cirdumstances. Mr. Barrett suffered a disastrous financial setback; and he and his family left Hope End. On July 11, 1840, Elizabeth's beloved 'Bro,"the dearest of friends and brothers in one,' was drowned while sailing off Torquay, a tragedy for which, according to her latest biographer, the poetess secretly blamed herself; and she gradually declined into a state of chronic invalidism. Followed a period of morbid seclusion—with Flush lying on the end of the sofa, ivy clambering across the window-panes, and dust accumulating and spiders crawling in the uncharted regions beneath the bed—which continued until the tempestuous advent of Robert Browning during the summer of 1845. But Mr. Boyd was never completely forgotten; and it says much for the qualities of both writers that they did not cease to correspond. Although she had long ago out- grown his influence, Elizabeth cherished her recollections of the lonely and disappointed scholar; while Mr. Boyd, although he had loved his pupil—with whom it is possible that at one time he may have been half 'in love'—was far too dignified to give way to an ignoble show of jealousy. Some 240 letters, addressed by Elizabeth to her old friend, were preserved by the writer's only .son; of which some sixty-seven were published by a Victorian editor. Miss Barbara McCarthy' has now edited the unpublished correspondence; and for every student of nineteenth-century literature it makes a delightful and absorbing book. Elizabeth Barrett does not take her place among the greatest English letter- writers; but her epistolary style is fresh and fluent, notwithstanding the priggishness and pedantry that sometimes complicate her earlier effusions; and, since she wrote frequently and usually wrote at length, a reader can pursue the unfolding drama of her personal life, and observe the adult development of that extra- ordinary mind and heart. The familiar aspects of the story are not the least enjoyable. It is always a pleasure to re-cross the threshold of the solemn house in Wimpole Street, enter the deep hush of Elizabeth's cloistral bedroom and listen for the sound on the staircase of Mr. Barrett's firm, majestic tread. But nothing can induce an affection for Flush—dear 'Flushie' who has just come 'galloping and prancing' in and kissed his mistress's pallid lips. He still strikes me, I- must admit, as a peculiarly detestable little dog.
PETER QUENNELL
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