your opinion, that Erasmus and his letters
are tiresome; but then please recollect that we had our moral to
work out, and to show to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the
reader how in various professions young men may get on without
patronage. To the good of our moral we were obliged to sacrifice;
perhaps we have sacrificed in vain. Wherever we are tiresome we may
be pretty sure of this, and after all, as Madame de Stael says,
"good intentions go for nothing in works of art"--much better in
French, "_La bonne intention n'est de rien en fait d'esprit_."

You will make me foreswear truth altogether, for I find whenever I
meddle with the least bit of truth I can make nothing of it, and it
regularly turns out ill for me. Three things to which you object
are facts, and that which you most abhor is most true. A nobleman
whom I never saw and whose name I have forgotten, else I should
not have used the anecdote--the word which you thought I could not
have written and ought not to have known how to spell. But pray
observe, the _fair_ authoress does not say this odious word in her
own proper person. Why impute to me the characteristic
improprieties of my characters? I meant to mark the contrast
between the niceness of his grace's pride and the coarseness of his
expression. I have now changed the word _severe_ into _coarse_ to
mark this to the reader. But I cannot alter without spoiling the
fact. I tried if saliva would do, but it would not. So you must
bear it as well as you can and hate His Grace of Greenwich as much
as you will, but don't hate me. Did you hate Cervantes for drawing
Sancho Panza eating behind the door?

My next fact, you say, is an old story. May be so, and may be it
belonged to your writer originally, but I can assure you it
happened very lately to a gentleman in Ireland, and only the
parting with the servant was added. I admit the story is ill told
and not worth telling, and you must admit that it is very natural
or it would not have happened twice.

The sixpence under the seal is my third fact. This happened in our
own family. One of my own grandfather's uncles forged a will, and
my grandfather recovered the estate my father now possesses by the
detection of the forgery of a sixpence under the seal.

Thank you, thank you, t