Excerpt from Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne

Rowe, and a score of lesser versifiers, wrote poetic dramas which were highly thought of. They lived their little day, and were forgotten. About a cen tury later, poetic dramas were written again. Cole ridge wrote Remorse; Maturin, Bertram; Shell, Evadne; Knowles, Virginius; Barry Cornwall, Mirandola; Milman, Fazio; Miss Mitford, Ricnziz and so on, say for twenty odd years, till Talfourd published Ion; Bulwer, Richelieu; Horne, his Cosmo di Medici; and Browning, Pippa Passes. The English public was indulgent to these productions; and their writers thought that the good old poetic drama was flourishing once more. Not a bit of it. It lasted about thirty years at most, and is as dead to-day as Julius Caesar. Mr. Tennyson may entertain himself by writing Mary anc Harold; but they might as well have remained unwritten. They are too late. They are not good closet-plays even, which I think Horne's tragedies are, judging from extracts from them, which are distinguished by energy of thought, and vigor of expression. Such, in brief, has been the life, and such are the works, of Richard Hengist Horne, the earliest literary friend of Mrs. Browning, after Miss Mitford, and so far the only one who has considered her letters as a part of the world's heritage in her genius. Withheld for a long time, they would not have been published now, but for the suddendiscovery that they were beginning to fade Her graphic lines, he writes, were in several instances on the borders of the vanishing-point. The notes to this edition of Mrs. Browning's Letters, with two or three exceptions, for which I am responsible, are by the editor of the English edition, Mr. S. R.

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