More important is the description of her numerous readings during the year, in which Spencer's translation plays the important part. She writes to Miss Arden Dec. 17:
You ask if I have seen Spencer's Leonora, with engravings by Lady D. Beauclerk? Lord Bagot sent me that charming work, so beyond all comparison superior to all the other translations. I have not read aloud less than fifty times this violent story, adorned by the pencil of kindred genius. . . . One party after another petitioned to hear it, till there was scarce a morning in which a knot of eight or ten did not flock to my apartments, to be poetically frightened: Mr. Erskine, Mr. Wilberforce—everything that was everything, and everything that was nothing, flocked to Leonora; and here, since my return, the fame of this business having travelled from Buxton hither, the same curiosity has prevailed. Its horrible graces grapple minds and tastes of every complexion. Creatures that love not verses for their beauty, like these for their horrors.[1]
Thus, at least in certain quarters, did the sedate and serious English mind respond to the new romanticism.
Mr. Spencer's translation of Bürger was to receive one further flattering notice from an eminent woman. In her De l' Allemagne, when published a second time in 1813,[2] Madame de Staël, in discussing Bürger in chapter xiii of the second part, says:
II y a quatre traductions de la romance de Lénore en englais, mais la première de toutes, sans comparison, c'est celle de M. Spencer, le poëte anglois qui connoit le mieux le véritable esprit des langues étrangères. L' analogie de l' anglois avec l' allemand permit d' y faire sentir en entier l' originalité du style et de la versification of Bürger; et non-seulement on peut retrouver dans la traduction les mêmes idées que dans l' original, mais aussi les mêmes sensations; et rien n' est plus necessaire pour connoitre un ouvrage des beaux-arts. II seroit difficile d' obtenir le même résultat en françois, où rien de bézarre n' est naturel
As this passage is not one marked for suppression by the Paris police when her first edition was allowed to go to press, Madame de Staël must have met Mr. Spencer's translation before her visit to London in the spring and summer of 1813, when she was so much feted by the society of the English capital. But Mr. Spencer was already somewhat known in French literary circles, for Delille makes allusion to him in his poem Les Jardins. In describing the
