‘determinate counsel’ not to be a fully developed monkey if I could help it, but when Mrs. J. assured me that she knew all the circumstances of the separation, though she could not betray a confidence, and entreated me ‘to keep my mind open’ on a subject which would one day be set in the light, I stroked down my feathers as well as I could, and listened to reason.  You know—­or perhaps you do not know—­that there are two women whom I have hated all my life long—­Lady Byron and Marie Louise.  To prove how false the public effigy of the former is, however, Mrs. Jameson told me that she knew nothing of mathematics, nothing of science, and that the element preponderating in her mind is the poetical element—­that she cares much for my poetry!  How deep in the knowledge of the depths of vanity must Mrs. J. be, to tell me that—­now mustn’t she?  But there was—­yes, and is—­a strong adverse feeling to work upon, and it is not worked away.

Then, I have seen a copy of a note of Lord Morpeth to H. Martineau, to the effect that he considered the mesmeric phenomena witnessed by him (inclusive, remember, of the languages) to be ’equally beautiful, wonderful, and undeniable’ but he is prudent enough to desire that no use should be made of this letter ...  And now no more for to-day.

With love to Mr. Martin, ever believe me
Your affectionate
BA.

[Footnote 127:  A copy of the 1838 volume for which Mrs. Martin had asked.]

To John Kenyan Saturday, February 8, 1845.

I return to you, dearest Mr. Kenyon, the two numbers of Jerold Douglas’s[128] magazine, and I wish ‘by that same sign’ I could invoke your presence and advice on a letter I received this morning.  You never would guess what it is, and you will wonder when I tell you that it offers a request from the Leeds Ladies’ Committee, authorised and backed by the London General Council of the League, to your cousin Ba, that she would write them a poem for the Corn Law Bazaar to be holden at Covent Garden next May.  Now my heart is with the cause, and my vanity besides, perhaps, for I do not deny that I am pleased with the request so made, and if left to myself I should be likely at once to say ‘yes,’ and write an agricultural-evil poem to complete the factory-evil poem into a national-evil circle.  And I do not myself see how it would be implicating my name with a political party to the extent of wearing a badge.  The League is not a party, but ’the meeting of the waters’ of several parties, and I am trying to persuade papa’s Whiggery that I may make a poem which will be a fair exponent of the actual grievance, leaving the remedy free for the hands of fixed-duty men like him, or free-trade women like myself.  As to wearing the badge of a party, either in politics or religion, I may say that never in my life was I so far from coveting such a thing.  And then poetry breathes in another outer air.  And then there is not an existent set of any-kind-of-politics I could agree with if I tried—­I, who am a sort of fossil republican!  You shall see the letters when you come.  Remember what the ‘League’ newspaper said of the ’Cry of the Children.’