E.B.B.—­rather, BA.

This letter has waited some days to be sent away, as you will see by the date.

[Footnote 199:  Mrs. Jameson’s Legends of the Monastic Orders, which had just been published.]

[Footnote 200:  Presumably not Mrs. Browning’s maid, but ’Christopher North.’]

At the end of March 1850, the long-deferred marriage of Mrs. Browning’s sister, Henrietta, to Captain Surtees Cook took place.  It is of interest here mainly as illustrating Mr. Barrett’s behaviour to his daughters.  An application for his consent only elicited the pronouncement, ’If Henrietta marries you, she turns her back on this house for ever,’ and a letter to Henrietta herself reproaching her with the ‘insult’ she had offered him in asking his consent when she had evidently made up her mind to the conclusion, and declaring that, if she married, her name should never again be mentioned in his presence.  The marriage having thereupon taken place, his decision was forthwith put into practice, and a second child was thenceforward an exile from her father’s house.

To Miss Mitford Florence:  [end of] April 1850.

You will have seen in the papers, dearest friend, the marriage of my sister Henrietta, and will have understood why I was longer silent than usual.  Indeed, the event has much moved me, and so much of the emotion was painful—­painfulness being inseparable from events of the sort in our family—­that I had to make an effort to realise to myself the reasonable degree of gladness and satisfaction in her release from a long, anxious, transitional state, and her prospect of happiness with a man who has loved her constantly and who is of an upright, honest, reliable, and religious mind.  Our father’s objections were to his Tractarian opinions and insufficient income.  I have no sympathy myself with Tractarian opinions, but I cannot under the circumstances think an objection of the kind tenable by a third person, and in truth we all know that if it had not been this objection, it would have been another—­there was no escape any way.  An engagement of five years and an attachment still longer were to have some results; and I can’t regret, or indeed do otherwise than approve from my heart, what she has done from hers.  Most of her friends and relatives have considered that there was no choice, and that her step is abundantly justified.  At the same time, I thank God that a letter sent to me to ask my advice never reached me (the second letter of my sisters’ lost, since I left them), because no advice ought to be given on any subject of the kind, and because I, especially, should have shrunk from accepting such a responsibility.  So I only heard of the marriage three days before it took place—­no, four days before—­and was upset, as you may suppose, by the sudden news.  Captain Surtees Cook’s sister was one of the bridesmaids, and his brother performed the ceremony.  The means are