I am in this case at the mercy of a wretched creature who to get into my favour again (to speak the plain truth) put in the gross, disgusting flattery in the notes—­yet Chorley, knowing this, none so well, and what the writer’s end is—­(to have it supposed I, and the others named—­Talfourd, for instance—­ARE his friends and helpers)—­he condescends to further it by such a notice, written with that observable and characteristic duplicity, that to poor gross stupid Powell it shall look like an admiring ’Oh, fie—­so clever but so wicked’!—­a kind of D’Orsay’s praise—­while to the rest of his readers, a few depreciatory epithets—­slight sneers convey his real sentiments, he trusts!  And this he does, just because Powell buys an article of him once a quarter and would expect notice.  I think I hear Chorley—­’You know, I cannot praise such a book—­it is too bad’—­as if, as if—­oh, it makes one sicker than having written ‘Luria,’ there’s one comfort!  I shall call on Chorley and ask for his account of the matter.  Meantime nobody will read his foolish notice without believing as he and Powell desire!  Bless you, my own Ba—­to-morrow makes amends to R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

                                Tuesday.
                                [Post-mark, March 24, 1846.]

How ungrateful I was to your flowers yesterday, never looking at them nor praising them till they were put away, and yourself gone away—­and that was your fault, be it remembered, because you began to tell me of the good news from Moxon’s, and, in the joy of it, I missed the flowers ... for the nonce, you know.  Afterward they had their due, and all the more that you were not there.  My first business when you are out of the room and the house, and the street perhaps, is to arrange the flowers and to gather out of them all the thoughts you leave between the leaves and at the end of the stalks.  And shall I tell you what happened, not yesterday, but the Thursday before? no, it was the Friday morning, when I found, or rather Wilson found and held up from my chair, a bunch of dead blue violets.  Quite dead they seemed!  You had dropped them and I had sate on them, and where we murdered them they had lain, poor things, all the night through.  And Wilson thought it the vainest of labours when she saw me set about reviving them, cutting the stalks afresh, and dipping them head and ears into water—­but then she did not know how you, and I, and ours, live under a miraculous dispensation, and could only simply be astonished when they took to blowing again as if they never had wanted the dew of the garden, ... yes, and when at last they outlived all the prosperity of the contemporary white violets which flourished in water from the beginning, and were free from the disadvantage of having been sate upon.  Now you shall thank me for this letter, it is at once so amusing and instructive.