Atheneum <1>
Saturday
Dear Talbot
I am very much obliged to you for your kind offer which presents a great temptation in the circumstances of your being so near a neighbour. There are however one or two [illegible deletion] considerations which must prevent my coming to any immediate decision. One of these is my having agreed to go & help Hare <2> at Hirstmonceaux next Spring, in consequence of which he has I believe made arrangements with his present curate to leave at that time – Another is of a different kind & though it would have been absurd to mention it if you had not made me such an offer it is perhaps right to do so now – The fact is that I find it requires a greater effort than I had expected, to settle myself permanently at so great a distance from my own friends & family of whom there is already a [illegible] established round the Ancestral home – I already hold a family living of about 160 [symbol] but it is a small & remote village on the moors & has no house on it If I could get another living small or great with a house [illegible deletion] on it either in the neighbourhood or within a feasible distance I should of course very much prefer it And I may possibly have some chance of effecting this – Do you conceive my position, & can you after having made a gratuitous offer brook this division-empiricism? If you can I will proceed as fast as I may to eliminate these two unknown quantities & send you the result.
I am very glad you meditate longer contributions to the Phil. M.<3> It seems to me most worthy of support Perhaps its only fault is being too good – fit readers will be few: Yet in time it must create more, & raise, or at least contribute to raise the standard of English Scholarship – Hare’s admiration of Thirlwalls <4> articles knows no bounds & I don’t wonder at it – of his scholarship I do not pretend to judge, lest his style seem to me a model of that kind spirit Hare wrote to me (before I had got the [illegible]<5> that his first, the Ancæus I think, had raised him at once above all English, & placed him on a level with the first german scholars – The irony in his review of the Bonn professors lucubration on Kenophons good citizenship is perfect – To vary the Streams criteria of illness, I have amused myself with translating not publishing one or two of Goethe’s <6> poesie of which as they are short you shall give me tho’ the weather is hot a critical opinion. Hare wants me to join him in translating Schleiermachers Einleitungen <7> to Plato’s dialogues qu’en pensez vous <8> They are marvellously hard german.
Ever yours
W.
W. H. F. Talbot Esqre
31 Sackville Street
Notes:
1. Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall, London: WHFT’s club; a gentleman’s club composed primarily of artists and scientists.
2. Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855), assistant tutor (1822–1832), Chaplain to the Queen (1853–1855).
3. The Philosophical Magazine.
4. Newell Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St Davids (1797–1875), author.
5. Text torn away under seal, and there is no visible closing bracket.
6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).
7. Friedrich Schleiermacher; Peter M Steiner; Andreas Arndt; Jörg Jantzen, Über die Philosophie Platons: Geschichte der Philosophie, Vorlesungen über Sokrates und Platon (zwischen 1819 und 1823), die Einleitungen zur Übersetzung des Platon (1804–1828).
8. What do you think?