If there were to be a small vignette at the end, I should like a wayside Calvary with a shadowy Knight in armour, lance in rest, approaching it from along a long flat road.

Now please (it is nearly post time!) forgive how very badly I have written these probably confusing suggestions.  I am not very well, and my head and thumb both fail me.

If you can do it, do it as you like.  I will send you a photo of an officer who will do for the Black Captain, and will try and secure a General also.  If you could lay your hands on the Illustrated Number that was “extra” for the death of the Prince Imperial—­a R.A. officer close by the church door, helping in one end of the coffin, is a very typical military face.

Yours, J.H.E.

TO A.E.

July 30, 1880.

* * * * *

Oh, with what sympathy I hear you talk of Shakespeare.  Nay! not Dante and not Homer—­not Chaucer—­and not Goethe—­“not Lancelot nor another” are really his peers.

Here blossom sonnets that one puts on a par with his—­there, in another man’s work the illimitable panorama of varied and life-like men and women “merely players,” may draw laughter and tears (Crabbe, and much of Dickens and other men, and Don Quixote).  His coarse wit and satire and shrewdness, when he is least pure, may I suppose find rivals in some of the eighteenth or seventeenth century English writers, and in the marvellous brilliancy of French ones.  When he is purest and highest I cannot think of a Love Poet to touch him.  Tennyson perhaps nearest.  But he seems quite unable to fathom the heart of a noble woman with any strength of her own, or any knowledge of the world.  “Enid” is to me intolerable as well as the degraded legend it was founded on.  Perhaps the brief thing of Lady Godiva is the nearest approach, and Elaine faultless as the picture of a maiden-heart brought up in “the innocence of ignorance.”  But he can write fairly of “fair women.”  Scott runs closer, but his are paintings from without.  “Jeanie Deans” is bad to beat!!

Shelley comes to his side when weirdness is concerned.

    “Five fathom deep thy father lies,” etc.,

is run hard by—­

    “Its passions will rock thee
      As the storms rock the ravens on high: 
    Bright reason will mock thee,
      Like the sun from a wintry sky.

    From thy nest every rafter
      Will rot, and thine eagle home
    Leave thee naked to laughter,
      When leaves fall and cold winds come.”

But I will not bore you with comparisons.  My upshot is that no one of the many who may rival him in SOME of his perfections, COMBINE them all in ONE genius.  In all these philosophizing days—­who touches him in philosophy?  From the simplest griefs and pleasures and humanity at its simplest—­Macduff over the massacre of his wife and children—­to all that the most delicate brain may search into and suffer, as Hamlet—­or the ten thousand exquisite womanish thoughts of Portia, a creature of brain power and feminine fragility—­