Five Autograph Letters Signed ('Godfrey Turner') to [Edward] Draper.

All five items good, on lightly aged paper. All five bifoliums, bearing traces of previous grey paper mount on the verso of the second leaf. LETTER ONE (one page, 12mo, 30 May 1865): He is 'very poorly', with a 'bad bilious attack which has threatened to turn into jaundice'. 'Yesterday I met Mr Herbert in Regent Street. We talked for a few minutes at cross purposes, my thoughts running on his journalistic prospects and projects, while he was thinking and speaking about his election at the Savage Club. [...] you may guess how we looked at each other without saying any more till a light burst on our minds and countenances, and we twigged'. 'I used bad language that Sunday evening when I came home and found how many friends had been and gone.' LETTER TWO (three pages, octavo, with small closed tear at crease not affecting text): 5 September 1885, on embossed letterhead of the Daily Telegraph. 'You are a Queen Annish kind of a chap.' Asks Draper's help regarding a reference Turner has made to an epigram on 'Bird's Statue of "Anna made great by conquering Marlboro'". It was something about her turning her back upon the church and her face towards a boozing-ken. Time was when I could have quoted the lines, and given the authority, pat enough. Now, alas, memory holds but an uneasy seal in this distracted nob. [...]'. Draper has docketed 'Brandy Nan, Brandy Nan left in the lurch, | Her face to the gin-shop her back to the Church.' LETTER THREE (one page, 12mo): 2 February [1887]. 'There seems to be a disposition, in a rather high quarter (the British Museum, if I may say so in confidence) to question the hands of Blake and Flaxman in the West sheets.' Asks Draper if he can do anything to 'strengthen [his] hands, so that [he] may be prepared if any controversial bomb shell or mine is suddenly sprung upon me. Keep this dark.' LETTER FOUR (one page, 12mo): 9 February 1887. A 'great surpise has been sprung upon' him. 'The collection of West's characters in the Brit. Mus. includes the water-colour sketch for the shop-bill!' He will be consulting it, and asks Draper to keep the information 'in [his] bosom locked'. 'My antagonist in the coming controversy has been very generous, and I must avoid any appearance of a disposition to steal his thunder, or rattle it about on my own account.' LETTER FIVE (three pages, 12mo): 28 January [no year], on letterhead of The Fielding, King Street, Covent Garden. They passed 'with a flash of salutation' half an hour, and he thinks he might have joined him in a 'quaart o' yeal' [quart of ale], especially as he wished to thank him for his portrait of "Obi" Smith, 'the more precious for being in its twopenny state - coloured'. 'This is not "wrote sarcastical." I have a great respect for your Hogarthian humour as expressed in strong water-colours - real chromatic eau-de-vie.' Decided not to send on a letter: 'I bethought me of the myrmidons through whose hands it would have to pass [...] some of them might be fathers of families, with scrap-books in their midst. So I would not cast temptation in their way.' Would like to 'meet (and drink) oftener than we do'. Refers to the 'inane swelldom' and 'the clever members who keep up the tradition (against which I have done battle even with you) that cleverness alone is club-able and that swelldom is aggressively inane'. 'You do me a kindness in reading what I write in the Theatre. Nobody else does!'