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Document number: 6077
Date: 05 Oct 1838
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: ARNOLD Thomas Kerchever
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Last updated: 8th March 2012

Lyndon
Oct 5, 1838

My dear Talbot,

I ought long ago to have thanked you for Hermes,<1> the sight of which, on my return from a holiday tour, gave me great pleasure. It carried me back (the reading of it I mean) to times when I was more familiar with your ingenious guesses & solutions, than I now am, when a laborious occupation almost entirely cuts me off from intercourse with the world, except the small part of it close to me. - I am glad to find that you are turning your attention to Etruscan Antiquities; in your remarks on which I pretty generally go along with you, as also in those on the names of the months. You do not convince me that the old derivations of drama & poet are wrong: with respect to the first the thing though 'merely simulated or pretended' is yet done or acted, if we compare scenic with pictorial representation., and with respect to the latter I think the Greeks hardly could use [Greek text], so regular a derivative in form, unless they referred it to [Greek text]. I wonder too that you do not allude it to our word - I mean the old word - 'maker,' "wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom we have mette well the Greeks," as Sir P. Sidney remarks. Moreover does not Trouveur & Troubadour do away with the remark in page 18, on which you build a good deal. - the derivatn of [Greek text] from [Greek text] is, according to Passow, the generally received one; & it is given by Aristotle, who (as Passow remarks) speaks of the derivation from [Greek text] as one less generally known &c.

I was much taken with the [Greek text] till Hesiod's [Greek text] and Pindar's [Greek text] made me doubt again.

Once more thanking you for the book & the entertainment I have receive[d] from it,

I remain my dear Talbot Yrs very sincerely
T. K. Arnold

P.S. I have not yet learnt to know you as a paterfamilias, but I hope that you are flourishing in that character. I have four children all in good health: - two girls & two boys.

[address panel]
Rotheram [sic] Oct seven 1838.
H. F. Talbot Esq

Lacock Abbey
Chippenham
[readdressed in C.H Talbot's hand:]
31, Sackville Street
London
Milton

Notes:

1. WHFT, Hermes: or Classical and Antiquarian Researches, No. 1. (London: Longman, Orme, Green, Brown & Longman, 1838); the second volume was published the following year.

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