of weeks since, a present--an album large and
gaping, and as Cibber's Richard says of the 'fair Elizabeth': 'My
heart is empty--she shall fill it'--so say I (impudently?) of my grand
trouble-table, which holds a sketch or two by my fine fellow Monclar,
one lithograph--his own face of faces,--'all the rest was amethyst.' F.
H. everywhere! not a soul beside 'in the chrystal silence there,' and
it locks, this album; now, don't shower drawings on M., who has so many
advantages over me as it is: or at least don't bid _me_ of all others say
what he is to have.

The 'Master' is somebody you don't know, W. J. Fox, a magnificent and
poetical nature, who used to write in reviews when I was a boy, and
to whom my verses, a bookful, written at the ripe age of twelve and
thirteen, were shown: which verses he praised not a little; which praise
comforted me not a little. Then I lost sight of him for years and
years; then I published _anonymously_ a little poem--which he, to my
inexpressible delight, praised and expounded in a gallant article in a
magazine of which he was the editor; then I found him out again; he got
a publisher for 'Paracelsus' (I read it to him in manuscript) and is in
short 'my literary father'. Pretty nearly the same thing did he for
Miss Martineau, as she has said somewhere. God knows I forget what the
'talk', table-talk was about--I think she must have told you the results
of the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at Ascot, and that day's, the
dinner-day's morning at Elstree and St. Albans. She is to give me advice
about my worldly concerns, and not before I need it!

I cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me--do go
on, and tell me all sorts of things, 'the story' for a beginning; but
your moralisings on 'your age' and the rest, are--now what _are_ they?
not to be reasoned on, disputed, laughed at, grieved about: they are
'Fanny's crotchets'. I thank thee, Jew (lia), for teaching me that word.

I don't know that I shall leave town for a month: my friend Monclar
looks piteous when I talk of such an event. I can't bear to leave him;
he is to take my portrait to-day (a famous one he _has_ taken!) and very
like he engages it shall be. I am going to town for the purpose. . . .

Now, then, do something for me, and see if I'll ask Miss M----to help
you! I am going to begin the finishing 'Sordello'--and to begin thinking
a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on
'Strafford')