Letter from Professor Herford, Aberystwyth, to Dr. Ward, 1888 January 29 : transcript of a manuscript in the hand of Katherine Bradley.

Thanking him for the introduction to "...Mr. Field's most striking drama, wh. reached me yesterday. Certainly the subject was waiting to be handled : it is well that it has been taken up by a man with so fine an eye for its capabilities. His suggestive words in the preface, 'when a vigorous aggressive & undisciplined people comes to recognise its barbarism through contact with the civilisation it has defaced, it wrestles with an intolerable scheme : in the evolutionary struggle the survivor is himself a tragic figure' - seem to me [illegible] an original conception of tragedy, one barely possible before our century. That merit however belongs doubtless to the suggested. But the execution is worthy of the thought. Without being exactly Shakespearean, it seems to me full of things which recall Shakespeare's touch & his imaginative reach & concentration. And the background of English landscape, though never obtrusive, is so skilfully made to carry out as it were [illegible] to the thought of the [illegible], that one well understands that the germ of the whole may have been in those summer days in Norfolk when he listened to the 'boom' of the Northern Ocean caress the 'shadowless, unguarded' stretches of English corn land & river. I have written to the editor of the Academy to ask whether he has already sent the book out : if not (of if he has not had it at all) I will gladly send him something on it.".