LETTER XX.

TO MADOX BROWN, HAMPSTEAD.

I am unable to say anything to the purpose about Brown’s “Hogarthian Sonnets.”

The joke about “the nigger” was a sort of offshoot from Carlyle’s _Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question_, a pronouncement which vastly amused my brother and several others in our set.

[Chatham Place, London. 24 September 1853.]

My dear Brown,

I shall be most glad to accept your invite for Sunday, to Finchley viâ Hampstead, and shall try at once for William, who I am sure will have equal pleasure if not pre-engaged--but these men of society!

The Hogarthian sonnets have great excellencies, especially the last; but they also present a few obscurities to which Browning alone might perhaps serve as a sort of introductory horn-book. Speaking of horn reminds me that like Desdemona I am “half asleep,” and must to bed. By the by, that play tends to show how the nigger, without due coercion, takes merely to beating his wife, and perhaps ends by choking her as an outlet for his waste energies.

I shall come on Sunday to Hampstead with or without William, at about three or half-past, and will bring the sonnets with me, and then go fully into them with you.

Meanwhile and ever I am your D. G. R.