which is highly improper for a religious hermit of course, but excusable in me who would accept brown serge as a substitute with ever so much indifference.  It is the white light which comes in the dimity which is so hateful to me.  To ’go mad in white dimity’ seems perfectly natural, and consequential even.  Set aside these foibles, and one thing is as good as another with me, and the more simplicity in the way of living, the better.  If I saw Mr. Chorley’s satin sofas and gilded ceilings I should call them very pretty I dare say, but never covet the possession of the like—­it would never enter my mind to do so.  Then Papa has not kept a carriage since I have been grown up (they grumble about it here in the house, but when people have once had great reverses they get nervous about spending money) so I shall not miss the Clarence and greys ... and I do entreat you not to put those two ideas together again of me and the finery which has nothing to do with me.  I have talked a great deal too much of all this, you will think, but I want you, once for all, to apply it broadly to the whole of the future both in the general view and the details, so that we need not return to the subject.  Judge for me as for yourself—­what is good for you is good for me.  Otherwise I shall be humiliated, you know; just as far as I know your thoughts.

Mr. Kenyon has been here to-day—­and I have been down-stairs—­two great events!  He was in brilliant spirits and sate talking ever so long, and named you as he always does.  Something he asked, and then said suddenly ...  ’But I don’t see why I should ask you, when I ought to know him better than you can.’  On which I was wise enough to change colour, as I felt, to the roots of my hair.  There is the effect of a bad conscience! and it has happened to me before, with Mr. Kenyon, three times—­once particularly, when I could have cried with vexation (to complete the effects!), he looked at me with such infinite surprise in a dead pause of any speaking. That was in the summer; and all to be said for it now, is, that it couldn’t be helped:  couldn’t!

Mr. Kenyon asked of ‘Saul.’ (By the way, you never answered about the blue lilies.) He asked of ‘Saul’ and whether it would be finished in the new number.  He hangs on the music of your David.  Did you read in the Athenaeum how Jules Janin—­no, how the critic on Jules Janin (was it the critic? was it Jules Janin? the glorious confusion is gaining on me I think) has magnificently confounded places and persons in Robert Southey’s urn by the Adriatic and devoted friendship for Lord Byron?  And immediately the English observer of the phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of Frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on Mme. Charles Reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of romances third and fourth rate, of questionable purity enough, too.