ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

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To Mr. Chorley

28 Via del Tritone, Rome:  May 2, [1860].

My dear Mr. Chorley,—­I make haste to answer your letter, and beg you to do the like in putting out of your life the least touch of pain or bitterness connected with me.  It is true, true, true, that some of my earliest gladness in literary sympathy and recognition came from you.  I was grateful to you then as a stranger, and I am not likely ever to forget it as a friend.  Believe this of me, as I feel it of you.

In the matter of reviews and of my last book, and before leaving the subject for ever, I want you distinctly to understand that my complaint related simply to the mistake in facts, and not to any mistake in opinion.  The quality of neither mercy nor justice should be strained in the honest reviewer by the personal motive; and, because you felt a regard for me, that was no kind of reason why you should like my book.

In printing the poems, I well knew the storm of execration which would follow.  Your zephyr from the ‘Athenaeum’ was the first of it, gentle indeed in comparison with various gusts from other quarters.  All fair it was from your standpoint, to see me as a prophet without a head, or even as a woman in a shrewish temper, and if my husband had not been especially pained by my being held up at the end of a fork as the unnatural she-monster who had ‘cursed’ her own country (following the Holy Father), I should have left the ‘mistake’ to right itself, without troubling the ‘Athenaeum’ office with the letter they would not insert.  In fact, Robert was a little vexed with me for not being vexed enough.  I was only vexed enough when the ‘Athenaeum’ corrected its misstatement in its own way. That did extremely vex me, for it made me look ungenerous, cowardly, mean—­as if, in haste to escape from the dogs in England, I threw them the good name of America.  ’Mrs. Browning now states.’

Well, dear Mr. Chorley, it was not your doing.  So the thing that ’vexed me enough’ in you was a mistake of mine.  Let us forgive one another our mistakes; and there, an end. I was wrong in taking for granted that the letter which referred to your review was entrusted to you to dispose of; and you were not right in being in too much haste to condemn a book you disliked to give the due measure of attention to every page of it.  The insurgents being plainly insurgents, you shot one at least of them without trial, as was done in Spain the other day.  True, that even favorable critics have fallen here and there into your very mistake; but is not that mainly attributable to the suggestive power of the ‘Athenaeum,’ do you not believe so yourself?  ‘Thais led the way!’