Thank you for the address. 
Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.

I observe that the most questionable rhymes are not objected to by
Mr. Merivale; also—­but this letter is too long already.

[Footnote 76:  Mr. Kenyon’s view evidently prevailed, for stanza 19 now has ‘scornful children.’]

To Mrs. Martin May 3, 1843.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­If you promised (which you did), I ought to have promised—­and therefore we may ask each other’s pardon....

How is the dog? and how does dear Mr. Martin find himself in Arcadia?  Do we all stand in his recollection like a species of fog, or a concentrated essence of brick wall?  How I wish—­and since I said it aloud to you I have often wished it over in a whisper—­that you would put away your romance, or cut it in two, and spend six months of the year in London with us!  Miss Mitford believes that wishes, if wished hard enough, realise themselves, but my experience has taught me a less cheerful creed.  Only if wishes do realise themselves!

Miss Mitford is at Bath, where she has spent one week and is about to spend two, and then goes on her way into Devonshire.  She amused me so the other day by desiring me to look at the date of Mr. Landor’s poems in their first edition, because she was sure that it must be fifty years since, and she finds him at this 1843, the very Lothario of Bath, enchanting the wives, making jealous the husbands, and ‘enjoying,’ altogether, the worst of reputations.  I suggested that if she proved him to be seventy-five, as long as he proved himself enchanting, it would do no manner of good in the way of practical ethics; and that, besides, for her to travel round the world to investigate gentlemen’s ages was invidious, and might be alarming as to the safe inscrutability of ladies’ ages.  She is delighted with the scenery of Bath, which certainly, take it altogether, marble and mountains, is the most beautiful town I ever looked upon.  Cheltenham, I think, is a mere commonplace to it, although the avenues are beautiful, to be sure....

Mrs. Southey complains that she has lost half her income by her marriage, and her friend Mr. Landor is anxious to persuade, by the means of intermediate friends, Sir Robert Peel to grant her a pension.  She is said to be in London now, and has at least left Keswick for ever.  It is not likely that Wordsworth should come here this year, which I am sorry for now, although I should certainly be sorry if he did come.  A happy state of contradiction, not confined either to that particular movement or no-movement, inasmuch as I was gratified by his sending me the poem you saw, and yet read it with such extreme pain as to incapacitate me from judging of it.  Such stuff we are made of!

This is a long letter—­and you are tired, I feel by instinct!

May God bless you, my dearest Mrs. Martin.  Give my love to Mr. Martin, and think of me as