My very dear Friend,—­You are kind to exceeding kindness, and I am as grateful as any of your long-ago kind invitations ever found me.  It is something pleasant, indeed, and like a return to life, to be asked by you to spend two or three days in your house, and I thank you for this pleasantness, and for the goodness, on your own part, which induced it.  You may be perfectly sure that no Claypon, though he should live in Arcadia, would be preferred by me to you as a host, and I wonder how you could entertain the imagination of such a thing.  Mr. Kenyon, indeed, has asked me repeatedly to spend a few hours on a sofa in his house, and, the Regent’s Park being so much nearer than you are, I had promised to think of it.  But I have not yet found it possible to accomplish even that quarter of a mile’s preferment, and my ambition is forced to be patient when I begin to think of St. John’s Wood.  I am considerably stronger, and increasing in strength, and in time, with a further advance of the summer, I may do ’such things—­what they are yet, I know not.’  Yes, I know that they relate to you, and that I have a hope, as well as an earnest, affectionate desire, to sit face to face with you once more before this summer closes.  Do, in the meantime, believe that I am very grateful to you for your kind, considerate proposal, and that it is not made in vain for my wishes, and that I am not likely willingly ‘to spend two or three days’ with anybody in the world before I do so with yourself.

Mr. Hunter has not paid us his usual Saturday’s visit, and therefore I have no means of answering the questions you put in relation to him.  We will ask him about ‘times and seasons’ when next we see him, and you shall hear.

Did you ever hear much of Robert Montgomery, commonly called Satan Montgomery because the author of ‘Satan,’ of the ’Omnipresence of the Deity,’ and of various poems which pass through edition after edition, nobody knows how or why?  I understand that his pew (he is a clergyman) is sown over with red rosebuds from ladies of the congregation, and that the same fair hands have made and presented to him, in the course of a single season, one hundred pairs of slippers.  Whereupon somebody said to this Reverend Satan, ’I never knew before, Mr. Montgomery, that you were a centipede’

Dearest Mr. Boyd’s affectionate and grateful
ELIBET.

Through the summer of 1845, Miss Barrett, as usual, recovered strength, but so slightly that her doctor urged that she should not face the winter in England.  Plans were accordingly made for her going abroad, to which the following letters refer, but the scheme ultimately broke down before the prohibition of Mr. Barrett—­a prohibition for which no valid reason was put forward, and which, to say the least, bore the colour of unaccountable indifference to his daughter’s health and wishes.  The matter is of some importance on account of its bearing on the action taken by Miss Barrett in the autumn of the following year.