22 October 1877 – 28 October 1877

To C. about 4. C. and I to King's Road. Chelsea omnibus to Charing Cross. We walk down the Embankment as far as Somerset House, ' one of the most dignified buildings in London.' Browning's Agamemnon. ' Oh yes, he called down some months ago to ask if he might dedicate it to me. I told him I should feel highly honoured. But — O bless me ! Can you understand it, at all} I went carefully into some parts of it and for my soul's salvation s (laughs) couldn't make out the meaning. If any one tells me this is because the thing is so remote from us — I say things far remoter from our minds and experiences have been well translated into English. The book of Job, for instance. It's bad Hebrew, I understand, the original of it, and a very strange thing to us. But the translator said to himself, " the first thing I have to do is to make this as intelligible as possible to the English reader ; if I do not this I shall be — h'm — I shall be — in fact damnedy But he succeeded most admirably, and there are very few books so well worth reading as our Book of Job. ' Yes, Browning says I ordered him to do this transla- tion— he winds up his preface (highly to his own satisfaction, in a neat epigrammatic manner) by saying so, — summing it all up in a last word ; and I did often enough tell him he might do a most excellent book, by far the best he had ever done, by translating the Greek Dramatists — but O dear ! he's a very foolish fellow. He picks you out the English for the Greek word by word, and now and again sticks two or three words together with hyphens ; then again he snips up the sense and jingles it into rhyme ! I could have told him he could do no good whatever under such conditions.' C. spoke of Swinburne — ' there is not the least intellectual value in anything he writes.' We spoke of the convicts Baxter and Swindlehurst, and agreed that many business people of high repute (even including some publishers) deserved no better a fate.