The Athenaeum takes up the ‘Tales from Boccaccio’ as if they were worth it, and imputes in an underground way the authorship to the members of the ‘coterie’ so called—­do you observe that?  There is an implication that persons named in the poem wrote the poem themselves.  And upon whom does the critic mean to fix the song of ‘Constancy’ ... the song which is ‘not to puzzle anybody’ who knows the tunes of the song-writers!  The perfection of commonplace it seems to me.  It might have been written by the ‘poet Bunn.’  Don’t you think so?

While I write this you are in town, but you will not read it till Sunday unless I am more fortunate than usual.  On Monday then!  And no word before?  No—­I shall be sure not to hear to-night.  Now do try not to suffer through ‘Luria.’  Let Mr. Moxon wait a week rather.  There is time enough.

Ever your

BA.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday.
[Post-mark, March 23, 1846.]

Oh, my Ba—­how you shall hear of this to-morrow—­that is all:  I hate writing?  See when presently I only write to you daily, hourly if you let me?  Just this now—­I will be with you to-morrow in any case—­I can go away at once, if need be, or stay—­if you like you can stop me by sending a note for me to Moxon’s before 10 o’clock—­if anything calls for such a measure.

Now briefly,—­I am unwell and entirely irritated with this sad ’Luria’—­I thought it a failure at first, I find it infinitely worse than I thought—­it is a pure exercise of cleverness, even where most successful; clever attempted reproduction of what was conceived by another faculty, and foolishly let pass away.  If I go on, even hurry the more to get on, with the printing,—­it is to throw out and away from me the irritating obstruction once and forever.  I have corrected it, cut it down, and it may stand and pledge me to doing better hereafter.  I say, too, in excuse to myself, unlike the woman at her spinning-wheel, ’He thought of his flax on the whole far more than of his singing’—­more of his life’s sustainment, of dear, dear Ba he hates writing to, than of these wooden figures—­no wonder all is as it is?

Here is a pure piece of the old Chorley leaven for you, just as it reappears ever and anon and throws one back on the mistrust all but abandoned!  Chorley knows I have not seen that Powell for nearly fifteen months—­that I never heard of the book till it reached me in a blank cover—­that I never contributed a line or word to it directly or indirectly—­and I should think he also knows that all the sham learning, notes &c., all that saves the book from the deepest deep of contempt, was contributed by Heraud (a regular critic in the ’Athenaeum’), who received his pay for the same:  he knows I never spoke in my life to ’Jones or Stephens’—­that there is no ‘coterie’ of which I can, by any extension of the word, form a part—­that