Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper
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stelle’—‘and the stars shone’—is a song from Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Tosca, which was first performed in 1900.
9 Layamon (fl.1200), Brut. Lewis was referring to Arthurian Chronicles, Represented by Wace and Layamon, translated by Eugene Mason, with an introduction by Lucy Allen Paton, Everyman’s Library [1912].
10 i.e. a hackney-coachman.
11 Robert Bridges, The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English and French From the Philosophers & Poets made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 & Dedicated by gracious permission to His Majesty the King (1916).
12 W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado (1885), Act II.
13 The preliminary selections of persons to be conscripted were apparently going on at this time.
14 John Edmund Barkworth (1858-1929) was an English composer educated at Rugby, Oxford and the Royal College of Music. His chief work, an opera based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was first performed on 7 January 1916.
15 Der Fliegende Hollander (‘The Flying Dutchman’), an opera by Richard Wagner (1843).
16 I Pagliacci (1892) is a short opera by Ruggiero Leoncavallo; Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) a short opera by Pietro Mascagni; and Rigoletto (1851) is an opera by Giuseppe Verdi.
17 John Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art (1857), the title of which was later changed to A Joy for Ever.
18 William Morris, Grettir Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong, translated from the Icelandic by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris (1869).
19 William Morris, Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, translated from the Icelandic by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris (1888).
20 Henry Rider Haggard, Pearl Maiden (1903).
21 Major George Harding, who was married to the former Charlotte Hope Ewart, had contracted double pneumonia in Sicily, where he had been sent to make the preliminary administrative arrangements for the transfer of a British Expeditionary Force to the Italian front. His wife was allowed to join him in Sicily, and she travelled overland alone via France and Italy
22 The home of the newlyweds, Gordon and Lily Ewart.
23 Robin W. Gribbon of ‘Ardvarna’, Strandtown, was Arthur Greeves’s cousin on his father’s side. His son, Charles Edward Gribbon (1898-1938), achieved distinction as an artist. (Sir) Frederick Lucius O’Brien (1869-1974) was Arthur’s cousin on his mother’s side. He had been educated at the Friends’ School, Lisburn, and Bootham School in York. He was the first chairman of the Northern Ireland Housing Trust, 1945-60, and during his life he held many civil and governmental positions in Belfast. He and Arthur often travelled together.
24 They were both Quakers.
25 He is referring to Gioacchino Rossini’s opera, Guillaume Tell, first performed in 1829. The opera is based on Friedrich von Schiller’s play, William Tell (1804). William Tell is arrested for failing to salute the Austrian hat which is set upon a pole, and compelled by Gesler to shoot at the apple which is placed upon his son’s head.
26 He means Robert Bridges is to blame because he translated the two pieces from Homer in The Spirit of Man.
27 Ecclesiastes 11:3: ‘In the place where the tree falleth, there shall it be.’
28 The Works of John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler, vol. 3 (1986), Sermon 108 ‘On Riches’, para. 8: ‘Nearly related to anger, if not a species of it, are fretfulness and peevishness. But are the rich more assaulted by these than the poor? All experience shows that they are. One remarkable instance I was a witness of many years ago. A gentleman of large fortune, while we were seriously conversing, ordered a servant to throw some coals on the fire. A puff of smoke came out. He threw himself back in his chair and cried out, “O Mr Wesley, these are the crosses which I meet with every day!” I could not help asking, “Pray, Sir John, are these the heaviest crosses you meet with?” Surely these crosses would not have fretted him so much if he had had fifty instead of five thousand pounds a year!’ (pp. 526-7). The ‘gentleman of large fortune’ was Sir John Phillipps (c. 1701-64).
29 The Collected Works of William Morris, with introduction by his daughter May Morris, 23 vols. (1910-15). The Works were limited to 1,050 copies.
30 George MacDonald, Phantastes: a Faerie Romance (1858). Lewis was reading the Everyman’s Library edition of 1915.
31 British Ballads: English Literature for Schools, ed. Arthur Burrell, Everyman’s Library [1914].
32 Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Introduction.
33 The lines are in fact from Shelley’s ‘Song’ (1824).
34 William Shakespeare, Henry V (1600), Prologue, 12.
35 Two terrible poets. Mrs Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) published her first volume of Poems when she was 15. Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), known as ‘the World’s Worst Writer’, was the author of Irene Iddesleigh (1897) and Poems of Puncture (1915). It became a customary feature of Lewis’s Inklings meetings at Magdalen College to bet that no one could read a passage from Irene Iddlesleigh without a smile.
36 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Break, Break, Break (1842), ll. 1-2: ‘Break, break, break, / On thy cold grey stones, O Sea’.
37 Philip Francis Little, Thermopylae and Other Poems (1916), reviewed as ‘An Uncertain Voice’ in The