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National Library of Wales, MS 4811D. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I bought eight volumes of old French Poetry at Lisbon,xxxx when under sentence of death. but the
metrical chronicle is not Cretins. Les Vigilles de Charles 7.
Your censure of the Cidxxxx spirit of poetry is nothing more than the
genuine language of the chronicles whence I have compiled. I am very sure that
the passages you would point out as most striking are literal translation. the
phrase denaturalize so exactly conveys its meaning that I have not now to alter
it – where it first occurs in the book I must explain that it was a form whereby
vassals legally threw off their allegiance, becoming enemies instead of vassals.
now to naturalize being an English word & precisely in
the converse meaning. it appears to me that the
to compound it with a privative was the shortest & most obvious of rendering
the meaning desired. the Cid is not so fair a specimen of my stile, as it is of
the manner in which I weave costume xxx
<with> the main thread. the oldest Spanish chronicle – that is in Spanish – the one compiled by order of Alonso the
Wisethe history <a
picture> of manners necessary to be understood than as history. xx xxx daylight begins only with in the Cids time.
I still suffer from weak eyes, an inflammation of the lower lids, so painful at night that I am usually obliged to sit in a dark room. this has sadly impeded my progress. I get on as well as I can but the loss of the candle light hours destroys half of the best half of my time.