arly in October I shall be back at my old
routine, stale enough. I think that, as a general rule, people should
die at 70.

Yes: though Edwards was comparatively a Friend of late growth--he, and
his brave wife--they encountered me down in my own country here, and we
somehow suited one another; and I feel sad thinking of the pleasant days
at Dunwich, which the Tide now rolling up here will soon reach. {277} . . .

I am here re-reading Forster's Life of Dickens, which seems to me a very
good Book, though people say, I believe, there is too much Forster in it.
At any rate, there is enough to show the wonderful Daemonic Dickens: as
pure an instance of Genius as ever lived; and, it seems to me, a Man I
can love also.

_Sentence from a Letter written to Prof. Norton Feb._ 22/80.

'I cannot yet get the 2nd Part (Coloneus) to fit as I wish to the first:
finding (what I never doubted) that nothing is less true than Goethe's
saying that these two Plays and Antigone must be read in Sequence, as a
Trilogy.'

_To C. E. Norton_.

WOODBRIDGE. _March_ 4, 1880.

MY DEAR NORTON,

Herewith you will receive, I suppose, Part I. of OEdipus, which I found
on my return here after a week's absence. I really hope you will like
it, after taking the trouble more than once to ask for it: only
(according to my laudable rule of Give or Take in such cases) say no more
of it to me than to point out anything amendable: for which, you see, I
leave a wide margin, for my own behoof as well as my reader's. And again
I will say that I wish you would keep it wholly to yourself: and, above
all, not let a word about it cross the Atlantic. I will not send a Copy
even to Professor Goodwin, to whom you can show yours, if he should
happen to mention the subject; nor will I send one to Mrs. Kemble, the
only other whom I had thought of. In short, you, my dear Sir, are the
only Depository of this precious Document, which I would have you keep as
though it were very precious indeed.

You will see at once that it is not even a Paraphrase, but an Adaptation,
of the Original: not as more adapted to an Athenian Audience 400 years
B.C. but to a merely English Reader 1800 years A.D. Some dropt stitches
in the Story, not considered by the old Genius of those days, I have, I
think, 'taken up,' as any little Dramatist of these Days can do: though
the fundamental absurdity of the Plot (equal to Tom Jones according to
Coleridge!) remains; namely, that OEdipus, a