The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1894. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... letter xl To Thomas Forbes Kelsall Zurich chcz M. Waser Nautadt Postmari 0 March 1837 My Dear Kelsall, --I am preparing for the press, as the saying is, among other graver affairs, a volume68 of prosaic poetry and poetical prose. It will contain half a dozen Tales, comic, tragic, and dithyrambic, satirical and semi-moral: perhaps half a hundred lyrical Jewsharpings in various styles and humours: and the stillborn D.J.B. with critical and cacochymical remarks on the European literature, in specie the hapless dramas of our day. I am not asinine enough to imagine that it will be any very great shakes, but what with a careless temper and the pleasant translunary moods I walk and row myself into upon the lakes and over the alps of Switzerland it will, I hope, turn out not quite the smallest ale brewed out with the water of the fountain of ye horse's foot. Now then, I write to beg you, as the saying is, to send me in a letter a copy of a certain scene and song wh you, being the possessor of the only existing ms. thereof once proposed as an amelioration of one in D's J. B. This affair will be very much cut down, a good many faults corrected; a little new matter added to it: and the whole better arranged. But I can hardly consent to eradicate my crocodile song, wh. you know, B. C. and all persons of proper feeling, as the saying is, strongly condemned. After all I only print it because it is written and can't be helped and really only for such readers as the pseudonymical lawyer mentioned, W. Savage Landor: yourself etc. (if there be yet a plural number left). G. D.69 appears to me to have grown deuced grey, whether it be the greyness of dawn, of life's evening twilight, or of a nascent asinine metempsychosis I cannot distinguish at this distance. As a specimen I send y..