PREFACE

My friend Mrs. Meynell has obliged me with a few words of introduction to this letter by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, here printed for the first time in an edition of twenty-five copies. It was written when she was twenty-one years of age, and residing at her father’s house near Ledbury in Herefordshire. She did not meet Robert Browning until nineteen years later, but her girlish enthusiasm for poetry is reflected in this letter. Her correspondent, Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), did not live to see her recognition as a great poet, although her Essay on Mind was published when she was nineteen and her Battle of Marathon, published in our day, was written at the age of fourteen. Price was a Herefordshire neighbour. He was a schoolfellow of Charles James Fox at Eton. He had great ideas on gardening, and developed them in his own grounds at Foxley and wrote an Essay on the Picturesque in 1784, enlarged afterwards into a three-volume work. Sir Walter Scott utilised Price’s ideas when he laid out the gardens at Abbotsford. Price was created a baronet in 1828. Letters from him are to be found in Miss Berry’s Journals. Miss Barrett’s letter was doubtless inspired by Uvedale Price’s An Essay on the Modern Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, which he had had privately printed at Oxford in the year 1827. I have not seen the book, a copy of which he doubtless gave to his fair neighbour. Its perusal served, I am sure, to explain certain obscure allusions in the letter. It urged that “our system of pronouncing the ancient languages is at variance with the principles and established rules of ancient prosody and the practice of the best poets.”

CLEMENT SHORTER.

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