poetry; and absolutely vain they are, and indeed all other qualities, without the essential thing, the genius, the inspiration, the insight—­let us call it what we please—­without which the most accomplished verse-writers had far better write prose, for their own sakes as for the world’s—­don’t you think so?  Which I say, because I sighed aloud over many names in your list, and now have taken pertly to write out the sigh at length.  Too charmingly you are sure to have written—­and see the danger!  But Miss Fanshawe is well worth your writing of (let me say that I am sensible warmly of that) as one of the most witty of our wits in verse, men or women.  I have only seen manuscript copies of some of her verses, and that years ago, but they struck me very much; and really I do not remember another female wit worthy to sit beside her, even in French literature.  Motherwell is a true poet.  But oh, I don’t believe in your John Clares, Thomas Davises, Whittiers, Hallocks—­and still less in other names which it would be invidious to name again.  How pert I am!  But you give me leave to be pert, and you know the meaning of it all, after all.  Your editor quarrelled a little with me once, and I with him, about the ‘poetesses of the united empire,’ in whom I couldn’t or wouldn’t find a poet, though there are extant two volumes of them, and Lady Winchilsea at the head.  I hold that the writer of the ballad of ‘Robin Gray’ was our first poetess rightly so called, before Joanna Baillie.

Mr. Lever is in Florence, I believe, now, and was at the Baths of Lucca in the summer.  We never see him; it is curious.  He made his way to us with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners at Lucca; and I, who am much taken by manner, was quite pleased with him, and wondered how it was that I didn’t like his books.  Well, he only wanted to see that we had the right number of eyes and no odd fingers.  Robert, in return for his visit, called on him three times, I think, and I left my card on Mrs. Lever.  But he never came again—­he had seen enough of us, he could put down in his private diary that we had neither claw nor tail; and there an end, properly enough.  In fact, he lives a different life from ours:  he in the ballroom and we in the cave, nothing could be more different; and perhaps there are not many subjects of common interest between us.  I have seen extracts in the ‘Examiner’ from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ which seemed to me exquisitely beautiful and pathetical.  Oh, there’s a poet, talking of poets.  Have you read Wordsworth’s last work—­the legacy?  With regard to the elder Miss Jewsbury, do you know, I take Mr. Chorley’s part against you, because, although I know her only by her writings, the writings seem to me to imply a certain vigour and originality of mind, by no means ordinary.  For instance, the fragments of her letters in his ‘Memorials of Mrs. Hemans’ are much superior to any other letters almost in the volume—­certainly to Mrs. Hemans’s own.  Isn’t this so?