The Honble.  William Lamb to John Murray.

December 20, 1822.

“The incongruity of, and objections to, the story of ‘Ada Reis’ can only be got over by power of writing, beauty of sentiment, striking and effective situation, etc.  If Mr. Gifford thinks there is in the first two volumes anything of excellence sufficient to overbalance their manifest faults, I still hope that he will press upon Lady Caroline the absolute necessity of carefully reconsidering and revising the third volume, and particularly the conclusion of the novel.

“Mr. Gifford, I dare say, will agree with me that since the time of Lucian all the representations of the infernal regions, which have been attempted by satirical writers, such as ’Fielding’s Journey from this World to the Next,’ have been feeble and flat.  The sketch in “Ada Reis” is commonplace in its observations and altogether insufficient, and it would not do now to come with a decisive failure in an attempt of considerable boldness.  I think, if it were thought that anything could be done with the novel, and that the faults of its design and structure can be got over, that I could put her in the way of writing up this part a little, and giving it something of strength, spirit, and novelty, and of making it at once more moral and more interesting.  I wish you would communicate these my hasty suggestions to Mr. Gifford, and he will see the propriety of pressing Lady Caroline to take a little more time to this part of the novel.  She will be guided by his authority, and her fault at present is to be too hasty and too impatient of the trouble of correcting and recasting what is faulty.”

“Ada Reis” was published in March 1823.

Another of England’s Prime Ministers, Lord John Russell, had in contemplation a History of Europe, and consulted Mr. Murray on the subject.  A first volume, entitled “The Affairs of Europe,” was published without the author’s name on the title-page, and a few years later another volume was published, but it remained an unfinished work.  Lord John was an ambitious and restless author; without steady perseverance in any branch of literature; he went from poems to tragedies, from tragedies to memoirs, then to history, tales, translations of part of the “Odyssey,” essays (by the Gentleman who left his Lodgings), and then to memoirs and histories again.  Mr. Croker said of his “Don Carlos”:  “It is not easy to find any poetry, or even oratory, of the present day delivered with such cold and heavy diction, such distorted tropes and disjointed limbs of similes worn to the bones long ago.”