GHL to John Blackwood, London, 9 October 1861
Title
GHL to John Blackwood, London, 9 October 1861
Title
GHL to John Blackwood, London, 9 October 1861
Sender
George Henry Lewes
Recipient
John Blackwood
Date(s)
- 1861-10-09
Place
London
Letter Content
GHL to John Blackwood, London, 9 October 1861
MS: National Library of Scotland. Hitherto unpublished.
Blandford Square, | N.W.
October 1861.
My dear Blackwood
By this post I send you the paper on '91Buckle'92 which I think had better not be kept any longer lest some of the points should be taken up by others and so give an old rechauff'e9 air to the paper when it appears. I hope you will agree with me that it is policy as well as justice to praise Buckle at the outset seeing how he is flayed throughout the rest of the paper. But if you don't like to commit Maga to so much admiration I can alter it in proof, with a letter from "Scalpel to the Editor? and so make praise and blame more personal.
Does not this moist warm muggy weather incapacitate you from Golf -- and not capacitate you for work? I feel as if one had the Turkish Bath gratis.
Mrs. Lewes is very well and buried in musty old antiquities, which she will have to vivify. I am a sort of Italian Jackal, hunting up rare books, and vellum bound unreadabilities in all the second hand book stalls of London. Sometimes I have great success -- the other day paid 3/- for a little book I despaired of getting because in Libri's sale 854 it fetched five guineas and as it consisted of about [a] hundred small latin poems, you may imagine its rarity.
In the course of these searches for her I alight upon some treasures for myself -- queer Middle Age books of science. By the way just to finish this sheet I will quote you a passage from one of them, -- Van Helmont, 855 -- which you will admit is only too good for Maga: "Hath any one with his excrements defiled the threshold of thy door, and thou intendest to prohibit that nastiness for the future, do but lay a redhot iron upon the excrement, and the immodest sloven shall in a very short space grow scabby on the buttocks; the fire torrifying the excrement, and by dorsal magnetism driving the acrimony of the burning into his impudent anus."
There's more of the like kind but nothing quite so good.
Ever faithfully yours
G. H. Lewes.
MS: National Library of Scotland. Hitherto unpublished.
Blandford Square, | N.W.
October 1861.
My dear Blackwood
By this post I send you the paper on '91Buckle'92 which I think had better not be kept any longer lest some of the points should be taken up by others and so give an old rechauff'e9 air to the paper when it appears. I hope you will agree with me that it is policy as well as justice to praise Buckle at the outset seeing how he is flayed throughout the rest of the paper. But if you don't like to commit Maga to so much admiration I can alter it in proof, with a letter from "Scalpel to the Editor? and so make praise and blame more personal.
Does not this moist warm muggy weather incapacitate you from Golf -- and not capacitate you for work? I feel as if one had the Turkish Bath gratis.
Mrs. Lewes is very well and buried in musty old antiquities, which she will have to vivify. I am a sort of Italian Jackal, hunting up rare books, and vellum bound unreadabilities in all the second hand book stalls of London. Sometimes I have great success -- the other day paid 3/- for a little book I despaired of getting because in Libri's sale 854 it fetched five guineas and as it consisted of about [a] hundred small latin poems, you may imagine its rarity.
In the course of these searches for her I alight upon some treasures for myself -- queer Middle Age books of science. By the way just to finish this sheet I will quote you a passage from one of them, -- Van Helmont, 855 -- which you will admit is only too good for Maga: "Hath any one with his excrements defiled the threshold of thy door, and thou intendest to prohibit that nastiness for the future, do but lay a redhot iron upon the excrement, and the immodest sloven shall in a very short space grow scabby on the buttocks; the fire torrifying the excrement, and by dorsal magnetism driving the acrimony of the burning into his impudent anus."
There's more of the like kind but nothing quite so good.
Ever faithfully yours
G. H. Lewes.
Signature
G. H. Lewes.
Citation
George Henry Lewes, GHL to John Blackwood, London, 9 October 1861, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/94701