ABSTRACT
Southcote are mere types of this Arch-Apostle of mystery & mysticism – but I have done: – no I have not done – for I have two petty & perhaps unworthy objections in small matters to make to him – which with his pretension to accurate observation & fury against Pope’s false translation of the ‘Moonlight scene in Homer’3 I wonder he should have fallen into – these be they. – He says of Greece in the body of his book – that it is a land of
rivers – fertile plains – & sounding shores Under a cope of variegated sky
The rivers are dry half the year – the plains are barren – and the shores still & tideless as the Mediterranean can make them – the Sky is anything but variegated – being for months & months – but ‘darkly – deeply – beautifully blue.’ – The next is in his notes – where he talks of our ‘Monuments crowded together in the busy &c. of a large town’ – as compared with the ‘still seclusion of a Turkish cemetery in some remote place’ – this is pure stuff – for one monument in our Churchyards – there are ten in the Turkish – & so crowded that you cannot walk between them – they are always close to the walks of the towns – that is – merely divided by a path or road – and as to ‘remote places’ – men never take the trouble in a barbarous country to carry their dead very far – they must have lived near to where they are buried – there are no cemeteries in ‘remote places’ – except such as have the cypress & the tombstone still left when the olive & the habitation of the living have perished.4 – These things I was struck with as coming peculiarly in my own way – and in both of these he is wrong – yet I should have noticed neither but for his attack on Pope for a like blunder – and a peevish affectation about him of despising a popularity which he will never obtain. – I write in great haste – & I doubt – not much to the purpose – but you have it hot & hot – just as it comes – & so let it go. – By the way – both he & you go too far against Pope’s ‘so when the Moon &c.’ it is no translation I know – but it is not such false description as asserted – I have read it on the spot –
d. From a letter to John Murray, 15 July 1817
Have you had no new Babe of Literature sprung up to replace the dead – the distant – the tired & the retired? no prose – no verse – no nothing?
