9 Athol Crescent | [Edinburgh] |Monday | May 19th.
Yesterday in church in the middle of the sermon (Oh! fie Mrs Coxe!) it suddenly flashed across me to wonder if Dr Tyndall had ever read Aytoun’s Lays!1 – on the instant I determined to send them to him – Unlike (too) many Sunday resolutions this had not, when Monday came – melted into thin air. So here they are – read them alone – and if you do not, while so employed, feel ‘the old blood bounding free, through pulse and heart and vein’2 – you are not the John Tyndall I take you for, and never more shall you be officer of mine! With a high tone of chivalry, there is a simple pathos – that even yet, – (countless as are the times that I have read and spouted them to myself.) gives me a choking sensation in my – throat! Then they are so absolutely without the morbid maudling sickly kind of sentimentality – for it is not sentiment – that so many/modern poets delight in – and for all that I know almost every one of them by heart. I have as much pleasure in them yet, as in the first time of their perusal.
You will be sorry you are not a Scot!
I shall mark them according to my idea of their excellence and it will please me to know us d’accord.3
The other day I saw in the paper an anecdote, which took my fancy so much, I shall run the risk of your having seen it, rather than let you miss it – It was headed ‘How to put a thing’4
In a theatre in Paris, while Rubini5 was in the act of singing, a Frenchman began to hum the same song. ‘Che Bestia’!6 wrathfully exclaimed an Italian – on which the Frenchman turned upon him with ‘qui ça Monsieur’?7
‘C’est Rubini – qui m’empêche d’entendre Monsieur’8 blandly replied the Italian! Confess that se non è vero, e ben trovato!9
My husband10 desires me to thank you for him – he says you will know how to make allowance for a man full of his own idea, and slaving to death. Really I do wish this Lunacy Commission11 were at an end, for save at meals and at my constitutional, I never now set eyes on him till 10 and after 11 at night. He sits in his den with an amount of papers and Documents that make one shudder to look at. I have the conviction that I shall end by becoming a “fatuous Pauper” myself!12
Now good bye – | Yours always | Mary Anne Coxe. |
RI MS JT/1/1/272
LT Transcript Only
Aytoun’s Lays: William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–65), Scottish barrister and poet who contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine. Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Edinburgh from 1845. Lady Coxe was referring to his Lays of the Scottish Cavalliers and other Poems (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1849) which appeared in a new edition in 1856. According to an annotation by LT, Lady Coxe wrote a dedication on the flyleaf of the copy she sent to Tyndall. The copy has not survived at the RI.
The old blood…heart and vein: ‘Come brothers; let me name a spell
Shall rouse your souls again,
And send the old blood bounding free
Through pulse, and heart, and vein!’
Ayrtoun, Lays of the Scottish Cavalliers, stanza VI of the poem ‘The Island of the Scots’.
know us d’accord: know us to be in agreement (French).
How to put a thing: quotation not traced.
Rubini: Giovanni Baptista Rubini (1794–1854), Italian tenor famous for his bel canto and tremulo.
Che Bestia: Italian, literally, ‘How beastly’, but in Italian slang also means ‘a load of bollocks’.
Qui ça, Monsieur: (French) ‘What’s that you said?’
C’est Rubini – qui m’empêche d’entendre Monsieur: (French) ‘It’s Rubini, who prevents me from hearing you.’
se non è vero, e ben trovato: an Italian proverb, ‘even if it is not true, it is a good story.’
My husband: James Coxe.
Lunacy Commission: Sir James Coxe was a Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland. See letter 1077, n. 1.
fatuous pauper: In the phraseology of the law of Scotland, ‘persons who, by reason of mental unsoundness are unfit for the management of themselves or their property, are termed “furious or fatuous persons and lunatics”, the first being applied to maniacs, the second to imbecile persons or idiots, and the last to insane persons generally.’ Report by Her Majesty’s Commissioner to Inquire into the State of Lunatic Asylums in Scotland (HMSO: Edinburgh, 1857), p. 3.
Please cite as “Tyndall1231,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on