Did I write a scolding letter, dearest Miss Mitford?  So much the better, when people deserve to be scolded.  The worst is, however, that it sometimes does them no sort of good, and that they will sit on among the ruins of Carthage, let ever so many messages come from Italy.  My only hope now is, that you will have a mild winter in England, as we seem likely to have it here; and that in the spring, by the help of some divine interposition of friends supernaturally endowed (after the manner of Mr. Chorley), you may be made to go away into a house with fast walls and chimneys.  Certainly, if you could be made to write, anything else is possible.  That’s my comfort.  And the other’s my hope, as I said; and so between hope and consolation I needn’t scold any more.  Let me tell you what I have heard of Mrs. Gaskell, for fear I should forget it later.  She is connected by marriage with Mrs. A.T.  Thompson, and from a friend of Mrs. Thompson’s it came to me, and really seems to exonerate Chapman & Hall from the charge advanced against them.  ‘Mary Barton’ was shown in manuscript to Mrs. Thompson, and failed to please her; and, in deference to her judgment, certain alterations were made.  Subsequently it was offered to all or nearly all the publishers in London and rejected.  Chapman & Hall accepted and gave a hundred pounds, as you heard, for the copyright of the work; and though the success did not, perhaps (that is quite possible), induce any liberality with regard to copies, they gave another hundred pounds upon printing the second edition, and it was not in the bond to do so.  I am told that the liberality of the proceeding was appreciated by the author and her friends accordingly—­and there’s the end of my story.  Two hundred pounds is a good price—­isn’t it?—­for a novel, as times go.  Miss Lynn had only a hundred and fifty for her Egyptian novel, or perhaps for the Greek one.  Taking the long run of poetry (if it runs at all), I am half given to think that it pays better than the novel does, in spite of everything.  Not that we speak out of golden experience; alas, no!  We have had not a sou from our books for a year past, the booksellers being bound of course to cover their own expenses first.  Then this Christmas account has not yet reached us.  But the former editions paid us regularly so much a year, and so will the present ones, I hope.  Only I was not thinking of them, in preferring what may strike you as an extravagant paradox, but of Tennyson’s returns from Moxon last year, which I understand amounted to five hundred pounds.  To be sure, ‘In Memoriam’ was a new success, which should not prevent our considering the fact of a regular income proceeding from the previous books.  A novel flashes up for a season and does not often outlast it.  For ‘Mary Barton’ I am a little, little disappointed, do you know.  I have just done reading it.  There is power and truth—­she can shake and she can pierce—­but I wish half