Item 323 - Letter from R. C. Trevelyan to Sir George Trevelyan

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c/o A. Waterfield, Fortezza la Brunella, Aulla, Massa Carrara, Italy. - Bessie will be with them by now; hopes they are having the same good weather with 'at last' is beginning here today; until now there has been 'nothing but rain and wind'. However, since the castle walls are 'about 15 feet thick', they are 'quite warm and sheltered within'. Must have been through Aulla, along the valley at the foot of the hill, that 'Hannibal marched after crossing the Appennines'; likes to think of him 'riding along down below on his last elephant, on which he crossed the flooded Arno'. The bones of an elephant, 'supposed to be of some extinct kind' were recently found about two miles from here; Robert prefers 'to imagine that they belong to Hannibal's last but one elephant, which had wandered away... and that Hannibal was in too great a hurry to send after it and recapture it'.

Wrote a paper about poetry for the Heretics Society at Cambridge last November; Kegan Paul have now offered to publish it 'as a small book' if he writes some more, so he will work on that now. It will be part of 'a series of books by various writers, some of them quite good, each with a classical title'. Thinks he will call his Thamyris, possibly Marsyas; the 'sub-title will be Is There a Future for Poetry', and of course he concludes that there is, but first 'point[s] out various problems to which modern poetry is liable'.

Does not think his translation of Theocritus will now be out before Easter, nor his 'small book of poems' [Poems and Fables, to be published by the Hogarth Press]. Expects his father is still reading the Gibbon letters, which 'Bessie would be sure to enjoy listening to'. Encloses a letter for her, and sends love to his mother.