Herford Manchester Born Literary Scholar Editor (2 results)

Both in good condition, lightly aged. ONE: 2pp, 12mo. He 'must bear the entire blame' for 'an indiscretion', and is 'exceedingly sorry'. 'Nothing was said between us in regard to the giving or withholding of addresses, & I had not at that time considered the point. But finding that the drafter of the letter had added his address, I & the fourth signatory added ours & I ventured to add yours - putting your business address, as one is apt to do, but in this case I admit most thoughtlessly, merely because I did not know your private one.' He asks him to 'use this letter as you think fit', explaining that 'The whole thing had to be arranged in a hurry at the last'. TWO: 2pp, 12mo. He has consulted with 'Vaughan', who 'thinks it wiser to take no further notice, having made our protest'. Despite there being points on which he would have liked to reply, Herford considers this 'the more dignified course'. 'It is he, not we, who is open to the charge of knowing better than the government: as usual it has been reserved for the clergyman to make proposals at once more timid & more cruel than any which commended themselves to the lay intelligence'.

6pp, 12mo. Paginated [1]-6. Lightly aged and a bit grubby. Folded twice. On six leaves of paper, which Herford has made up by tearing in half the 4to leaves of one of his students' essays. Complete, and signed at the end 'C H Herford'. Written in a close hand, with numerous deletions and emendations. He begins by describing how Shelley met his death, and his final writing, before dismissing the suggestion that he committed suicide: 'we may dismiss the utterly uncalled for suggestion that his own hand "lifted" the veil'. Citing Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in support, he also dismisses 'the theory, first broached a generation after his death, on dubious & indirect evidence, that his frail skiff was deliberately run down by native fishers who mistook it for the boat of the wealthy "milord" Byron'. Having dealt with these matters, he states that: 'The hundred years which have since passed have shown how limited, beyond the desolating catastrophe of the moment, was the power of that storm'. He discusses how the years in which Shelley lived - 'obscure, lonely, maligned, derided' - point 'towards oblivion & decay', in contrast with the poet's '"rich & strange" after-fame'. He attacks at length Matthew Arnold's assessment of Shelley, and contrasts the poet's attitude to loneliness ('a symbol of his own frailty & failure') with Wordsworth's ('the source of sublime feeling'). In his view, 'the prevalence in Shelley of this cloudland of sublime abstractions must not blind us to the fine, & even genial, human qualities which were especially his'. He quotes from the poet, stating that everyone 'can enjoy the company of this very companionable Shelley', but concluding with the thought that readers need to be persuaded that 'that dream of a humanity in which not force but hope & faith & love are the determining principles of social order, was not a thin abstraction spun by a metaphysical brain, but the vision of an ardent heart. Cor Cordium, - "heart of hearts", that, & not even "great poet", was the inscription set with the verses already quoted upon his grave, by the friend [i.e. Trelawney] who had plucked its physical symbol from the flames that consumed his body on the day of that sublime romantic funeral, by the resounding shore between the dazzling marble mountains & the deep blue Mediterranean Sea'. From the J. Cumming Walters papers.