Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The earnestness of this letter seems effectually to have dissipated Mr Brandram's scruples, for events moved forward with astonishing rapidity. Four days after the receipt of Borrow's letter, a resolution was adopted by the Committee to the following effect:
Mr Armstrong, although he had frequently been in his late employer's study, had never noticed this picture before. Now, as he caught sight of it and suddenly met the flash of those wild bright eyes, he experienced something like a shock. He could not help recalling Dr Brandram's sad story the other day. Something seemed mysteriously to connect this portrait and the story together in his mind.
If ever I get a fever, keep me going on beefsteak and mashed potatoes. It's been a great lark having no lessons. Armstrong's forgotten my existence, I think. He and Rosalind have regular rows about sitting up with him I mean Roger, and Rosalind generally has to cave in. It does her good to cave in now and then. Armstrong's the only one can make her. I can't; nor can Brandram. Brandram's a stunner.
In the same letter, which was so to incur Mr Brandram's disapproval, Borrow tells of the excellent results of his latest plan for disposing of Bibles and Testaments, three hundred and fifty of the former having been sold since he reached Spain.
In reply to Mr Brandram's letter Borrow wrote: "I did not return to England immediately after my departure from Madrid for several reasons.
Mr Brandram's comment on this portion of Borrow's letter is rather suggestive of deliberate fault-finding. Perhaps you will not often meet with a better set of men than those who assembled in Earl Street, but they may not always be open to the force of language, and so unwonted a phrase may raise odd feelings in their minds. Do not be in a passion, will you, for the freedom of my remarks.
Nothing could have been more unfortunate than the effect produced upon Mr Brandram's mind by this letter. "I scarcely know what to say," he writes. "You are in a very peculiar country; you are doubtless a man of very peculiar temperament, and we must not apply common rules in judging either of yourself or your affairs. What, e.g., shall we say to your confession of a certain superstitiousness?
Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated. Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out!
The tone of this letter is strangely reminiscent of some of the Rev Andrew Brandram's admonitions to Borrow himself, during his association with the Bible Society. Borrow bowed to the wind, and the offending passage was deleted, and The Romany Rye eventually appeared on 30th April 1857, in an edition of a thousand copies.
It is pleasant to record that the Sub-Committee expressed itself as unable to see in Mr Brandram's letter what Borrow saw. There was no intention to convey the impression that he had made false statements, and regret was expressed that he had thought it necessary to apply to the Embassy for confirmation of what he had written. All this Mr Brandram conveyed in a letter dated 6th August.
Word Of The Day