Letters from the Grand Tour by Joseph Spence (review)

396 LETTERS IN CANADA found under both, but there is no cross reference. In a note (p 611.) to a late [c.1860] edition ofMy Mother, Miss Stewart writes: 'I have been unable to trace one of the artists, E. Jewitt'; this is almost certainly Edwin Jewitt of the celebrated family of nineteenth-century artists and brother to the better-known Orlando and Llewellynn [sic] Jewitt. That which is true of the Indexes of Illustrators and Engravers, and of the American Booksellers , Printers, and Publishers, is also true of the British Publishers, and there are omissions, inconsistencies, and mistakes. How can one fairly summarize one's sampling of a work on such a scale? By returning perhaps and contradicting something one said earlier : if this book had been set in type there would have been runningheads to the pages, with the serial number of the work andlor a short title that would have made it so much easier to find one's way about; and the critical scrutiny of the less-involved eye of the editor would have revealed many of the disfiguring slips which mar the texture and threaten the purpose of a bibliography on which thousands of hours must have been lavished, and which contains more information about the books of the Taylor family than has ever before been available. It is with regret that one has to draw attention to the numerous faults in a book that has, nonetheless, a considerable usefulness. (DESMOND G. NEILL) Joseph Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour, edited by Slava Klima. Montreal & London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1975, xii, 496, $25.00 On Christmas Eve 1730 Joseph Spence, travelling as companion to the young Lord Middlesex, left England on the first of his three European tours. They passed the remainder of that winter at Dijon and the summer at Lyons, then moved via Geneva to Northern Italy and spent the winter of 1731-2 at Venice. In the spring they went south to Rot:ne and on to Naples, where they climbed Vesuvius. The next winter they spent at Florence, then returned through France to England in 1733. Spence's second tour, in 1737, stopped short of Italy: he spent a month at The Hague, then travelled via Paris to settle first at Blois, then at Tours; but in January 1738 his young gentleman, John Morley Trevor, was recalled to England as Pelham nominee in a by-election at Lewes. The third tour, with Lord Lincoln, took Spence initially to Turin (October 1739), where they spent almost a year. They went on south as far as Naples, but spent most of the 1740-1 winter at Rome, before turning back through France to reach England in November 1741. Other governors were more adventurous , like Lord Sandwich's Mr Frolick, who shot an eagle on the Great Pyramid; but to the Oxford classicist and professor of poetry the reason for travel was Italy. Although the modem Romans were'effeminated to the last degree,' the great past was omnipresent: 'This is the place where HUMANITIES 397 Julius Caesar was stabbed by Brutus; at the foot of that statue he fell ...' Spence perceived 'the mutual light' given to one another by descriptive poetry and the plastic arts; his perception, and much careful research, bore fruit in Polymetis (1747). Throughout his five-and-a-halfyears abroad Spence wrote faithfully to his widowed mother at home in Winchester, and these letters, of which 142 survive, make up four-fifths of Professor Klima's collection. They are not without charm, as when Spence imagines the old lady turning traveller, but they are sometimes a little embarrassing in their filial intimacy (which Spence largely censored when he later went over the letters with intent to publish). As literature they fall well short of the best eighteenth-century correspondence, partly because the writer, while justly claiming'a knack of enlarging stories a little,' does lack real dramatic sense, and partly because the author ofPolymetis can hardly explain to Mirabella Spence the intellectual excitement of Europe, as he can to Henry Rolle or in his Notebooks, from which Professor Klima prints a generous selection. Yet when the Notebook doubts at...