Success!

Now that I have a new computer (OMG! It has memory! I can have the Robert Elsmere MS and my footnote document open at the same time!), I am continuing my adventures with cut-and-paste while attempting to deal with some mysterious references (from outer space, quite possibly).  One of the mysterious references was a quotation from Etienne Pivert de Senancour’s Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (1799), which Mrs. Ward translated from the original French.  Freely translated from the original French.   A lot of impolite language--or, as Mr. Spock would say, "colorful metaphors"--ensued as I hunted around in the Senancour for something that bore at least a passing resemblance to the (loooong) quotation.  And lo! This very evening, I finally found the quotation! Victory was at hand!

That is, until I realized that Mrs. Ward had silently combined chunks of text from different places in Senancour.  Random passers-by no doubt heard me uttering further colorful metaphors, which I shall not repeat here as my parents read this blog and might be dismayed.  After much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and, more on point, additional attempts to find likely retranslations of the translation of the original, I located the rest of Mrs. Ward's paragraph...forty-three pages after its "beginning."  Can I just say that Mrs. Ward did not write with the convenience of her future editors in mind? Sheesh.