care our highest people have for poetry of the ——­ school, that Vice-Chancellor Wood, one of the most accomplished men whom I have ever known, a bosom friend of Macaulay, was with me last week, and had never heard of Alexander Smith.

I continue terribly lame, and with no chance of amendment till the spring, when you will come and do me good.  Besides the lameness, I am also miserably feeble, ten years older than when you saw me last.  I am working as well as I can, but very slowly.  I send you a proof of the Preface to the Dramatic Works (not knowing whether they have sent you the sheets, or when they mean to bring it out).  The few who have seen this Introduction like it.  It tells the truth about myself and says no ill of other people.  God bless you, dear friend.  Say everything for me to all friends, not forgetting Mr. Ticknor.

    Ever yours, M.R.M.

    Swallowfield, November 8, 1853.

My Very Dear Friend; Your letters are always delightful to me, even when they are dated Boston; think what they will be when they are dated London.  In my last I sent you a very rough proof of my Preface (I think Mr. Hurst means to call it Introduction), which you will find autobiographical to your heart’s content; I hope you will like it.  To-day I enclose the first rough draft of an account of my first impression of Haydon.  Don’t print it, please, because I suppose they mean it for a part of the Correspondence when it shall be published.  I looked out for those sixty-five long letters of Haydon’s,—­as long, perhaps, each, as half a dozen of mine to you,—­and doubtless I have many more, but I was almost blinded by the dust in hunting up those, my eyes having been very tender since I was shut up in a smoky room for twenty-two weeks last winter.  I find now that Messrs. Longman have postponed the publication of the Correspondence in the fear that it would injure the sale of the Memoirs, the book having had a great success here.  By the enclosed, which is as true and as like as I could make it, you will see that he was a very brilliant and charming person.  I believe that next to having been heart-broken by the committee and the heartlessness of his pupil ——­, and enraged by the passion for that miserable little wretch, Tom Thumb, that the real cause of his suicide was to get his family provided for.  It succeeded.  By one way and another they had L440 a year between the four; but although the poor father never complained, you will see by his book what a selfish wretch that ---- was.....

My tragedies are printed, and the dramatic scenes, forming, with the preface, two volumes of above four hundred pages each.  But I don’t think they are to come out till the prose work, and that is not a quarter finished.  I am always a most slow and laborious writer (that Preface was written three times over throughout, and many parts of it five or six), and of course my ill health