Item 173 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

4 pp

Herstmonceux, Hailsham - Could WW get JCH a copy of Sandys' translation of the Psalms from either Trinity or the University Library. JCH originally wanted to make a few selections from the authorized versions for his own church, but found them feeble and diluted. Hence he 'despaired of doing much good till I got hold of the Scotch version, which, if it were not regardless of idiom and grammar and rhythm and metre, would be excellent. This led me to fancy that it would be possible with the help of them to produce something better than any of them, and that might endeavour to preserve as much as possible of the simplicity and dignity of the original, in the pure English of our Bible, yet without violating the [genius?] of our language; and I have been trying on this principle to collect a version of all such passages as seemed in any way adapted for the worship of a Christian congregation. Should such an attempt be at all successful, and get ultimately sanctioned by authority, it seems to me that it would be the greatest benefit that could be conferred on our Liturgy, of which the Psalmody has always been the scandal and the gest'. JCH thinks WW's objections to John S. Mill's article on Bentham 'are very unjust, bringing forward reproofs for which there is no foundation. Little good is done by attacking a man as one of a body with general censure. It is better to single him out individually, more especially if he be a man of any mark. John Mill, it is true, was bred up by his father in all his father's abominable doctrines; and it is possible that in his youth he may have been a zealot in maintaining them. At all events for many years he has shown that he has purged himself from them, and risen far above them. He has come forward as a cordial admirer of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Plato, shewing a great faculty of receiving their truths, though not indiscriminately. It must be six or seven years since Wordsworth told me how much he had been struck by him, and that he was one of the most remarkable young men of the age. Of his writings I have not read much; but all that I have has been most masterly in execution, shewing a logical power and a metaphysical subtilty very rare in England, united with a high tone of moral feeling. Having long been an intimate friend of Sterling's [John Sterling], he tried when the London Review was set up, to get him as a contributor. But at that time there was much of his father's leaven poisoning the review, and I refused. During his fathers life, I believe, Mill was withheld by a most praiseworthy feeling from declaring how completely he differed from the Benthamites: but on his father's death, he got the Review entirely into his own hands, and resolved to make it as far as he could a Review for principles, and for the best literature: and the two or three numbers I have seen are certainly in a much higher tone and spirit than any other literary review of the day that I know of. He has not quite got rid of the old contributors, but he has been trying to enlist the best new ones, and has got Napier, Carlyle, and Sterling; while the Benthamites are reviling him as a Coleridgian Tory. It does not seem to me that we ought to look with suspicion on a man who comes over in this way from the enemy's camp, openly, and by change of which one may trace the progress'.