that because we are away here in the wilderness (which blossoms as a rose, to one of us at least) we may not be full of affectionate thoughts and feelings towards you in your different sort of life in London.  So sorry we are—­I especially, for I think I understand the grief especially—­about the household troubles which you hint at and Mr. Kenyon gave us a key to.  I quite understand how a whole life may seem rumpled up and creased—­torn for the moment; only you will live it smooth again, dear Mr. Chorley—­take courage.  You have time and strength and good aims, and human beings have been happy with much less.  I understate your advantages on purpose, you see.  I heard you talked of in Florence when Miss Cushman, in the quarter of an hour she gave us at Casa Guidi, told us of the oath she had in heaven to bring out your play and make it a triumph.  How she praised the play, and you!  Twice I have spoken with her—­once on a balcony on the boulevard, when together we saw Louis Napoleon enter Paris in immediate face of the empire, and that once in Florence.  I like the ‘manly soul’ in her face and manners.  Manly, not masculine—­an excellent distinction of Mrs. Jameson’s.  By the way, we hear wonderful things of the portrait painted of Miss Cushman at Rome by Mr. Page the artist, called ’the American Titian’ by the Americans....

There I stop, not to ‘fret’ you beyond measure.  Besides, now that you Czars of the ‘Athenaeum’ have set your Faradays on us, ukase and knout, what Pole, in the deepest of the brain, would dare to have a thought on the subject?  Now that Professor Faraday has ‘condescended,’ as the ‘Literary Gazette’ affectingly puts it (and the condescension is sufficiently obvious in the letter—­’how we stoop!’)—­now that Professor Faraday has condescended to explain the whole question—­which had offered some difficulty, it is admitted, to ’hundreds of intelligent men, including five or six eminent men of science,’ in Paris, and, we may add, to thousands of unintelligent men elsewhere, including the eminent correspondent of the ’Literary Gazette’—­let us all be silent for evermore.  For my part, I won’t say that Lord Bacon would have explained any question to a child even without feeling it to be an act of condescension.  I won’t hint under my breath that Lord Bacon reverenced every fact as a footstep of Deity, and stooped to pick up every rough, ungainly stone of a fact, though it were likely to tear and deform the smooth wallet of a theory.  I, for my part, belong, you know, not to the ‘eminent men of science,’ nor even to the ‘intelligent men,’ but simply to the women, children (and poets?), and if we happen to see with our eyes a table lifted from the floor without the touch of a finger or foot, let no dog of us bark—­much less a puppy-dog!  The famous letter holds us gagged.  What it does not hold is the facts; but, en revanche, the writer and his abettors know the secret of being invincible—­which is, not to fight.  My child proposed a donkey-race yesterday, the condition being that he should ride first.  Somebody, told me once that when Miss Martineau has spoken eloquently on one side of a question, she drops her ear-trumpet to give the opportunity to her adversary.  Most controversies, to do justice to the world, are conducted on the same plan and terms.