And you, how are you, and what are you doing?

May God bless you, my dear dear friend!

Ever yours I am, affectionately and gratefully,
E.B.B.

To Mr. Chorley 50 Wimpole Street:  November 1845.

I must trouble you with another letter of thanks, dear Mr. Chorley, now that I have to thank you for the value of the work as well as the kindness of the gift, for I have read your three volumes of ’Pomfret’[137] with interest and moral assent, and with great pleasure in various ways:  it is a pure, true book without effort, which, in these days of gesture and rolling of the eyes, is an uncommon thing.  Also you make your ‘private judgment’ work itself out quietly as a simple part of the love of truth, instead of being the loud heroic virtue it is so apt in real life to profess itself, seldom moving without drums and trumpets and the flying of party colours.  All these you have put down rightly, wisely, and boldly, and it was, in my mind, no less wise than bold of you to let in that odour of Tyrrwhitism into the folds of the purple, and so prevent the very possibility of any ‘prestige.’  If I complained it might be that your ‘private judgment’ confines its reference to ‘public opinion,’ and shuns, too proudly perhaps, the higher and deeper relations of human responsibility.  But there are difficulties, I see, and you choose your path advisedly, of course.  The best character in the book I take to be Rose; I cannot hesitate in selecting him.  He is so lifelike with the world’s conventional life that you hear his footsteps when he walks, and, indeed, I think his boots were apt to creak just the soupcon of a creak, just as a gentleman’s boots might, and he is excellently consistent, even down to the choice of a wife whom he could patronise.  I hope you like your own Mr. Rose, and that you will forgive me for jilting Grace for Helena, which I could not help any more than Walter could.  But now, may I venture to ask a question?  Would it not have been wise of you if, on the point of reserve, you had thrown a deeper shade of opposition into the characters or rather manners of these women?  Helena sits like a statue (and could Grace have done more?) when she wins Walter’s heart in Italy.  Afterwards, and by fits at the time, indeed, the artist fire bursts from her, but there was a great deal of smouldering when there should have been a clear heat to justify Walter’s change of feeling.  And then, in respect to that, do you really think that your Grace was generous, heroic (with the evidence she had of the change) in giving up her engagement?  For her own sake, could she have done otherwise?  I fancy not; the position seems surrounded by its own necessities, and no room for a doubt.  I write on my own doubts, you see, and you will smile at them, or understand all through them that if the book had not interested me like a piece of real life, I should not find myself backbiting as if all these were ‘my neighbours.’  The pure tender feeling of the closing scenes touched me to better purpose, believe me, and I applaud from my heart and conscience your rejection of that low creed of ’poetical justice’ which is neither justice nor poetry which is as degrading to virtue as false to experience, and which, thrown from your book, raises it into a pure atmosphere at once.