or,
Le Byron de nos Jours
Text and publication
First publ. DP, 28 May 1864; repr. 18642, 1868, 1880, 1888. Our text is 1864. The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. It is a very clean copy, with few cancelled readings. There is only a handful of verbal variants between MS and 1864 (mostly towards the end of the poem) and none in subsequent editions; all are minor, and the only significant textual change is in the speech-punctuation of ll. 99–100, where the re-positioning of quotation marks changes the way in which the speaker brings to a close her speculative ‘voicing’ of her companion’s thoughts when they met ten years before.
Composition and date
The main action of the poem (the speaker’s narrative) is almost certainly set in Pornic, a seaside resort on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, which B. began visiting after the death of EBB. Other poems reflecting this locale in DP include James Lee (p. 665) and Gold Hair; cp. also Fifine at the Fair (1872). As with A Likeness (p. 642), some details belong to the mid-1850s: Heine (l. 40) and Schumann (l. 36) both died in 1856. DeVane suggests that ‘it is possible that the poem was the product of Browning’s summer of 1858, spent at Le Havre with his wife and his father’ (Handbook 288). But it must be remembered that, as with Youth and Art (p. 700), the speaker is alluding to events that have taken place years earlier, and that the ‘now’ of l. 36 (‘Schumann’s our music-maker now’) belongs to a train of thought which is imagined to have taken place a decade before the present time of the poem. This complex poem may of course have been conceived and/or drafted over a long period and have a shifting frame of reference; but the Pornic setting establishes 1862–3 as the main period of composition, though note that B. also stayed at Sainte-Marie (also in Brittany, near Pornic) in 1862, and wrote poetry there (see headnote to James Lee, p. 666).
Setting
The situation is that at a public gathering – probably a ball, possibly in Paris – a woman has met a man she last met ten years before; before the poem’s beginning he has told her that when they last met, at a seaside resort, he came near to suggesting that they marry or become lovers (see below), but decided against; the poem picks up the ‘conversation’ (i.e. the woman’s monologue) at that point. We never quite fully learn what the man has said to her, beyond an admission that he had decided not to declare his love for her. Clearly, a good deal of what she says represents a paraphrase of what he must be imagined as having just said to her. She reproaches him for what she takes to have been a combination of laziness, cowardice and needless pessimism on his part, and indicates that their liaison would have been superior to the relationships they now separately endure.
One issue concerns the nature of the proposal that the man is expected but fails to make to the woman. Orr assumes that he was ‘on the point of offering her his hand’ (Handbook 217), that is, of proposing marriage, and a number of critics have adopted this interpretation. It has been suggested that he might be considering asking her to consent to become his mistress: he is, after all, ‘Famous … for verse and worse’ and ‘one whose love-freaks pass unblamed’ (l. 60); the term ‘my friend’ (l. 76) fits this interpretation, since ‘friend’ appears elsewhere in B. as a euphemism for ‘lover’ (see, e.g., Ring v 198). On the other hand the phrases ‘Thus were a match made’ (l. 51, repeated with ‘for best or worst’ at l. 100), and the allusion to her ‘money in the Three per cents’ (l. 64) which would form part of a marriage settlement, point the other way.
Sources and influences
The subtitle has prompted a search for specific precedents in Byron’s life and work, but none are fully convincing. It must be remembered that the allusion is to a ‘latterday Byron’, either a come-down from the authentic original (would the ‘real’ Byron have behaved with the timid calculation of his successor?) or that original grown older, in whom rational self-interest has outlived romance. There is no real foundation in the poem for, e.g., DeVane’s suggestion that B. ‘has in mind Byron’s poem The Dream [1816], where he protests to Mary Chaworth that his life and hers would not have been ruined if she had accepted his love when he had offered it years before’ (Handbook 289); for one thing, Byron was only 28 when he wrote it. The poem’s sardonic tone, and its exaggeration of ‘poetic’ effect to the point of travesty, point to Byron’s comic poems Beppo and Don Juan; and, further back, Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1660–80). Arthur Hugh Clough’s recently published Amours de Voyage (1858) is a probable influence: it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the American journal in which several poems of DP were also published, and it contains a similar theme of a man fatally hesitating about his attitude to a woman, and losing his chance with her. The style is similarly racy and (self-)mocking. The Brownings had read Clough’s The Bothie years earlier, with interest and approval; see headnote to A Grammarian (p. 589). Another possible source is Arnold’s ‘Marguerite’ lyrics, publ. (mainly) 1852 and subsequent collections to 1857: see esp. ‘To Marguerite—Continued’, l. 21: ‘A God, a God their severance ruled!’
The poem is unusual, probably unique, in that the second line of each stanza is internally and not externally rhymed, and the internal rhyme occurs at the end of the line: ‘I say, the day’, etc. This produces some striking phrases which sound like quotations, though few of them are.
Parallels in B.
The failure to take advantage of a supreme moment of opportunity contrasts with the denouement of By the Fire-Side (p. 456), to which this poem forms a bitter pendant. Its critique of amorous procrastination recalls The Statue and the Bust (III 342) and Youth and Art (p. 700), with which it shares its bohemian atmosphere; in both these poems the outcome is not conventionally ‘tragic’ but one of spiritual desiccation and a defeated acceptance of social conventions. Cp. also, in B.’s later work, Inapprehensiveness (Asolando 1889). The contemporary setting recalls Respectability (III 227) and Fifine at the Fair (1872), both set in France. The contrast between a life dominated by, respectively, art and love (ll. 31–40) is anticipated in Last Ride (III 285) and Cleon (p. 563). But its jarring cynicism of tone and moody jocularity link it with other poems in DP, notably James Lee (p. 665), Confessions and A Likeness (p. 642). The centrality of a poet in the poem’s plot reflects a broader concern in DP, most notable in Too Late. The speaker’s argument in the poem—that she and the man ought to have dared to bridge the gulf in age and experience between them, since the attempt itself would have affirmed their faith in transcendence, and thereby saved their souls—is underpinned by the ‘doctrine of imperfection’ which is central to B.’s metaphysics: see esp. ll. 116–20n., 141–2n.
The system of ‘nested’ voices within a dramatic monologue reaches its climax at ll. 81–5, in which the speaker ‘voices’ her interlocutor’s thoughts when they met ten years previously, thoughts which involve his voicing of her thoughts if they were to marry. B. had not attempted this level of complexity since Sordello, which had recently been reprinted in the Poetical Works of 1863; many of B.’s revisions to the poem during the 1850s had involved him in wrestling with this kind of difficulty (see, e.g., iii 599n., I 565). As with Sordello, the printers of 1864 failed to cope: see l. 85n. B. returned to the charge in Fifine at the Fair (1872) where the situation is reversed: the male speaker (Don Juan) often ‘voices’ the thoughts of his wife, Elvire.
1
Stop, let me have the truth of that!
Is that all true? I say, the day
Ten years ago when both of us
Met on a morning, friends—as thus
5 We meet this evening, friends or what?—
2
Did you—because I took your arm
And sillily smiled, “A mass of brass
That sea looks, blazing underneath!”
While up the cliff-road edged with heath,
10 We took the turns nor came to harm—
3
Did you consider “Now makes twice
That I have seen her, walked and talked
With this poor pretty thoughtful thing,
Whose worth I weigh: she tries to sing;
15 Draws, hopes in time the eye grows nice;
“Reads verse and thinks she understands;
Loves all, at any rate, that’s great,
Good, beautiful; but much as we
Down at the Bath-house love the sea,
20 Who breathe its salt and bruise its sands:
5
“While … do but follow the fishing-gull
That flaps and floats from wave to cave!
There’s the sea-lover, fair my friend!
What then? Be patient, mark and mend!
25 Had you the making of your scull?”
6
And did you, when we faced the church
With spire and sad slate roof, aloof
From human fellowship so far,
Where a few graveyard crosses are,
30 And garlands for the swallows’ perch,—
7
Did you determine, as we stepped
O’er the lone stone fence, “Let me get
Her for myself, and what’s the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth—
35 Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?
“Schumann’s our music-maker now;
Has his march-movement youth and mouth?
Ingres’s the modern man that paints;
Which will lean on me, of his saints?
40 Heine for songs; for kisses, how?”
9
And did you, when we entered, reached
The votive frigate, soft aloft
Riding on air this hundred years,
Safe-smiling at old hopes and fears,—
45 Did you draw profit while she preached?
10
Resolving “Fools we wise men grow!
Yes, I could easily blurt out curt
Some question that might find reply
As prompt in her stopped lips, dropped eye,
50 And rush of red to cheek and brow:
11
“Thus were a match made, sure and fast,
’Mid the blue weed-flowers round the mound
Where, issuing, we shall stand and stay
For one more look at Baths and bay,
55 Sands, sea-gulls, and the old church last—
12
“A match ’twixt me, bent, wigged, and lamed,
Famous, however, for verse and worse,
Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair
When gout and glory seat me there,
60 So, one whose love-freaks pass unblamed,—
13
“And this young beauty, round and sound
As a mountain-apple, youth and truth
With loves and doves, at all events
With money in the Three per Cents;
65 Whose choice of me would seem profound:—
14
“She might take me as I take her.
Perfect the hour would pass, alas!
Climb high, love high, what matter? Still,
Feet, feelings, must descend the hill:
70 An hour’s perfection can’t recur.
15
“Then follows Paris and full time
For both to reason: ‘Thus with us!’
She’ll sigh, ‘Thus girls give body and soul
At first word, think they gain the goal,
75 When ’tis the starting-place they climb!
16
“‘My friend makes verse and gets renown;
Have they all fifty years, his peers?
He knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay;
Boys will become as much one day:
80 They’re fools; he cheats, with beard less brown.
17
“‘For boys say, Love me or I die!
He did not say, The truth is, youth
I want, who am old and know too much;
I’d catch youth: lend me sight and touch!
85 Drop heart’s blood where life’s wheels grate dry!’
18
“While I should make rejoinder”—(then
It was, no doubt, you ceased that least
Light pressure of my arm in yours)
“‘I can conceive of cheaper cures
90 For a yawning-fit o’er books and men.
19
“‘What? All I am, was, and might be,
All, books taught, art brought, life’s whole strife,
Painful results since precious, just
Were fitly exchanged in wise disgust
95 For two cheeks freshened by youth and sea?
20
“‘All for a nosegay!—what came first;
With fields on flower, untried each side;
I rally, need my books and men,
And find a nosegay: drop it, then,
100 No match yet made for best or worst!’”
21
That ended me. You judged the porch
We left by, Norman; took our look
At sea and sky; wondered so few
Find out the place for air and view;
105 Remarked the sun began to scorch;
22
Descended, soon regained the Baths,
And then, good bye! Years ten since then:
Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
110 On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths.
23
Now I may speak: you fool, for all
Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey
Sad church, that solitary day,
115 Crosses and graves and swallows’ call?
Was there nought better than to enjoy?
No feat which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due?
120 No forcing earth teach Heaven’s employ?
25
No wise beginning, here and now,
What cannot grow complete (earth’s feat)
And Heaven must finish, there and then?
No tasting earth’s true food for men,
125 Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?
26
No grasping at love, gaining a share
O’ the sole spark from God’s life at strife
With death, so, sure of range above
The limits here? For us and love,
130 Failure; but, when God fails, despair.
This you call wisdom? Thus you add
Good unto good again, in vain?
You loved, with body worn and weak;
I loved, with faculties to seek:
135 Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?
28
Let the mere star-fish in his vault
Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger-tips:
He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
140 Man, found with either in default.
29
But what’s whole, can increase no more,
Is dwarfed and dies, since here’s its sphere.
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That, I well believe;
145 Or you had saved two souls: nay, four.
For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
Ancle, or something. “Pooh,” cry you?
At any rate she danced, all say,
Vilely: her vogue has had its day.
150 Here comes my husband from his whist.
Title: Virgil, Aeneid ii 428. B. himself made what is evidently a translation of this tag in a letter to Lawrence Barrett of 3 Feb 1885: ‘“It has seemed otherwise to the Divinities” as the Poet says’ (LH 235).
Subtitle: French: ‘the Byron of our time’, ‘the latterday Byron’. No original for this phrase has been identified. It may possibly have been influenced by the title of B.’s friend Joseph Milsand’s 1851 essay ‘La Poésie Anglaise Depuis Byron’ [English Poetry Since Byron]. For the ‘Byronic’ aspect of the poem, see headnote, Sources.
1. One of three poems by B. beginning with the word ‘Stop’; the others are Transcendentalism (III 641) and Ponte dell’ Angelo, Venice (Asolando, 1889).
15. nice: ‘That requires or involves great precision or accuracy’ (OED).
18–23. but much as we … fair my friend! The speaker is imagining what the man might have been thinking when they met ten years ago, and suggests that he would have seen her as naïve and inexperienced; the metaphor compares her love for art and poetry to the ‘love’ of the sea claimed by a bather who merely ‘bruise[s] the sands’ of the shore, and contrasts it with the genuine love of the sea felt by the ‘fishing-gull’, a creature native to that element.
19. Bath-house: ‘a building equipped with facilities for bathing, occas. public baths; U.S., a place where one may change into beach clothes at the seaside, etc.’ (OED). B.’s usage here seems closer to the American sense than to the British one.
25. scull] skull (1880); cp. Rabbi Ben Ezra 173 (p. 662).
26–7. the church / With spire and sad slate roof: for the suggestion that B. might have the church at Pornic in mind here, see headnote, Composition.
31–40. Cp. Last Ride Together 67–88 (III 289–90). In a letter to EBB. of 26 Feb. 1846, B. related an anecdote of the Baptist divine Robert Hall (1764–1831), who ‘when a friend admired that one with so high an estimate of the value of intellectuality in women should yet marry some kind of cook[-]maid-animal, as did the said Robert,—wisely answered—“you can’t kiss Mind!”’ (Correspondence xii 105).
36–7. The German composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) wrote a number of marches for piano; there may be a specific reference to his Carnaval (1834–1835), which concludes with a ‘march of the Davidsbündler against the Philistines’: B. refers in detail to Carnaval in Fifine (1872) at l. 588ff. Ohio notes that in Nov. 1861 B. purchased Boosey’s Musical Cabinet, containing piano works by Schumann among others (Collections A1699); the date suggests that the purchase was made for Pen’s education.
38–9. B. (or his speaker) may be engaging in deliberate paradox here: Jean Baptiste Dominque Ingres (1780–1867), although he was at the height of his fame in the 1850s and 1860s, was regarded not as a ‘modern’ but as an upholder of classical values in art; he was over 80 when the poem was published; nor was he primarily a religious painter, and though his Virgin Adoring the Host (1852, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII (1854, Louvre) were well-known works, he was more famous as a painter of the voluptuous female nude, epitomized in The Turkish Bath (1862, Louvre). Ohio notes that Ingres exhibited his work at the Paris International Exposition of 1855, when the Brownings were in Paris; see Rossetti’s letter to Allingham of 25 November 1855, and EBB’s to Julia Martin of 19 Dec. 1855, in which she notes that Ingres has been made a Senator. Several of his paintings were also shown at the London International Exhibition which ran from May to November 1862 and which B. almost certainly attended.
40. Heine for songs: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was an immensely celebrated German author. The word ‘songs’ may point to his Buch der Lieder (‘Book of Songs’, 1827), which was translated into English by J. E. Wallis in 1856 and enjoyed a popular vogue in England; this work would have held a special poignancy for B. because EBB.’s versions of six of these songs formed the concluding item in her Last Poems, which he edited in 1862. See John Woolford, Browning the Revisionary (1988) 91–2. See also Matthew Arnold’s essay ‘Heinrich Heine’ (1863). B. had mentioned Heine in Christmas-Eve 1116 (III 90–1). In a letter to B. of 23 July 1864 Julia Wedgwood quoted a couple of lines from the Buch der Lieder.
42. votive frigate: referring to a folk custom in Brittany whereby fishermen or other seafarers who had survived a shipwreck would make a votive offering of a model vessel to the Virgin Mary or the saint whose intercession had saved them, to be placed in a niche or (as here) hung above the altar of their local church; these models range from small-scale, primitive constructions to large and finely detailed carvings offered by an entire community. B. could have seen examples in numerous churches and chapels in Brittany.
45. she: i.e. the ‘votive frigate’.
51. Thus] So (MS).
57. for verse] through verse (MS). verse and worse: cp. Thomas Hood, ‘Literary and Literal’ (1830?) 23–4: ‘Think of your prose and verse, and worse—delivered in / Hog’s Norton!—’. Hood was a friend of B.’s in the 1840s.
58. Sure of election to the Académie Française, whose membership is restricted to forty; when an academician dies his (or, rarely, her) ‘chair’ (fauteuil) is declared vacant and a new occupant is nominated. Each chair is numbered, so the new occupant inherits it from a line of predecessors. The Académie was founded originally in the seventeenth century to purify the French language; B. may have known Matthew Arnold’s essay ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’ (1864), which bestowed very high praise on the Académie’s civilizing influence, though it appears here as a bastion of cultural orthodoxy: cp. Respectability (p. 345).
61. round and sound: the phrase occurs in Robert Lytton’s ‘An Evening in Tuscany’ (1855) 81–2: ‘And the grapes are green: this season / They’ll be round and sound and true’. Lytton was a close friend of the Brownings in the 1850s. It was clearly a hawker’s cry (so specified in Samuel Jackson’s ‘To Mr George Mavor’ [1805] 1–4: ‘And what to you, dear blithsome boy, / Compos’d of ease and health and joy, / Fair round and sound, as hawkers cry / Their early cherries, —“Buy, come buy?”’).
62. youth and truth: cp. Philip James Bailey, Festus (1852): ‘With the bright unworldly hearts of youth and truth, / And the maiden bosoms of the beautiful’ (p. 43). Also Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848) ch. xxx: ‘“It is enough,” said Edith, steadily, “that we are what we are. I will have no youth and truth dragged down to my level” ’ (p. 307).
63. With loves and doves: cp. Too Late 89. The phrase is frequently used to mock the clichés of romance, as in Walter Harte’s ‘Eulogius’ (1767) 427–8: ‘Where limpid streams are clear, and sun-shine bright; / Where woos and coos, and loves and doves unite.’
64. Three per Cents: government bonds yielding low but guaranteed interest, used here as an emblem of a safe, respectable social and financial situation.
72. Thus with us: cp. Exodus xiv 11: ‘wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt?’ The phrase is not uncommon in prose works, particularly of the Renaissance.
73. Cp. EBB., ‘Amy’s Cruelty’ 23–4: ‘He wants my world, my sun, my heaven, / Soul, body, whole existence’. This would reinforce the connection with the mid-1850s (see headnote), as ‘Amy’s Cruelty’ was probably given to Marguerite Power in Paris in 1856 (see headnote to Mock Epitaph, III 700). ‘Thus] “So (MS).
76. friend: see headnote.
81–5. The speaker is, at this point, imagining how the man she is addressing would have imagined her response to him had they stayed together; part of this response consists of her attempt to exonerate him from the charge of having misled her with the language of romantic love (the passage in italics at ll. 82–5 consists of statements the speaker in this imagined past did not make). For the ‘nesting’ of voices within the speaker’s monologue, see headnote, Parallels.
85. life’s wheels] my wheels (MS, canc.). dry!’] 1864 lacks the required closing quotation mark; we emend in agreement with MS, 1868, and 1880. 1888, oddly enough, agrees with 1864, a very rare instance of this text reverting to a misprint in an earlier edition.
94. fitly exchanged] a fit exchange (MS).
98. Cp. Morning [Parting at Morning] 4 (II 359): ‘the need of a world of men for me’.
99–100. nosegay: drop it … best or worst!’”] nosegay:’ drop it … best or worst!” (1868–88). The change in speech-punctuation in 1868–88 effects a small but significant shift in the emotional balance of the poem: the man’s speech (which the woman is ‘voicing’) ends at ‘nosegay’, and the remaining, scornful words are hers. Cp. the closing lines of Pretty Woman (III 24).
100. for best or worst: the phrase recalls, but is not from, the marriage service, which has ‘for better or for worse’.
101. That ended me: ‘that finished my chance of securing your proposal’.
102–6. took … wondered … Remarked … Descended: ‘we’ must be understood as the subject of all these verbs, though it appears nowhere: the effect is to incorporate the speaker’s point of view in that of her companion (‘you took our look’, etc.).
104. Find] Found (MS, written over ‘Find’, canc.); this is a rare instance of 1864 returning to a reading cancelled in MS.
107–10. Years ten … sand-paths: the woman refers to the setting in which the man’s revelation of his earlier intentions (‘you tell me, now’) takes place, contrasting it with that of the events she narrates.
107. And then] And so (MS).
116–20. The vocabulary here echoes many such moments of metaphysical stress in B., in which the yearning for transcendence is thwarted by the temporality of human life. Sordello’s ruin is foreshadowed as the consequence of ‘Thrusting in time eternity’s concern’ (i 566, I 432), and ‘forcing earth teach Heaven’s employ’ also brings about the downfall of the poet Thamuris in the lyric ‘Thamuris marching’ (see headnote to Abt Vogler, p. 761), yet in another perspective these failures are gloriously superior to conventional triumph. The same might be said of the limitless ambition and tiny actual achievement of the Grammarian (p. 586). The dual application of this principle to both art and love is exemplified in Andrea del Sarto’s famous cry: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a Heaven for?’ (ll. 96–7, p. 395).
121–5. This is the only stanza in which the rhyme-scheme is varied (abccb, not abcca).
123. And] So (MS). there and then: revitalising the cliché: the ‘wise beginning’ of love between the speaker and the man would have been completed ‘there’ (in heaven) and ‘then’ (after death).
125. Cp. Crashaw, ‘Sainte Mary Magdelene or The Weeper’ (1636) 36: ‘sweetnesse so sad, sadnesse so sweet’. Its … its] Her … her (MS).
127. O’ the] Of the (MS).
128–9: so … here? I.e. ‘in this way [by declaring your love for me], with confidence that there was a higher existence beyond this one’.
129. here? For] now: for (MS).
130. when God fails: ‘when the idea of God fails’ (as it did for the man, who failed to grasp the opportunity presented to him).
131. wisdom] progress (MS).
134. with faculties to seek: ‘with powers not yet developed’.
135.] Both loves worth nothing since ill-clad! (MS).
136–40. The identity of the starfish is in perfect harmony with its functions, but this image of wholeness and completeness is paradoxically of less value than human imperfection: cp. A Death 577–81 (pp. 752–3). See also l. 138n. and ll. 140–1n. 138. Rose-jacynth: the compound is B.’s coinage; ‘jacynth’ (more usually ‘jacinth’) is a reddish-orange colour, from the gemstone of that name (OED). B. may have known the (obsolete) sense of ‘rose’ as a starfish (OED 16a., citing an example from 1688).
141–2. A common argument in B., reflecting the ‘doctrine of imperfection’: what appears complete can be so only in the material world, and must hence be subject to mortality, diminution and dissolution, whereas incompleteness demands or appears to demand completion in a spiritual world. See Old Pictures 130n. (p. 419), and cp. Wanting Is—What? (Jocoseria 1884), esp. ll. 9–10: ‘Come then, complete incompletion, O comer, / Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!’ Cp. also Rephan (Asolando, 1889).
141. But what’s whole] What’s whole now (MS).
142.] Dies or is dwarfed, since here’s its sphere: (MS).
144–5. Samuel Butler’s quip that the Carlyles’ marriage ensured that only two people were made miserable, not four, dates from 1884; but the jest was probably ancient, and B. here characteristically inverts it.
146. Stephanie: the context suggests that this is the man’s current wife or mistress, who is a dancer. Cp. Too Late (DP, 1864) 79–80: ‘so and so / Married a dancer’.
147. Ancle] Ankle (1868–88). ‘Ancle’ was a possible spelling in the period, and generally preferred by B., as in a letter in which he remarks, ‘I unluckily sprained my ancle yesterday’ (to Monckton Milnes, 23 May 1862: NL 145); but contrast Youth and Art 44, p. 705.
150. whist: on the association of card-playing with immorality in B., cp. Bishop Blougram 48n. (p. 288).