your
excellent article in the 'New Quarterly.' It is not my habit to thank
or to remonstrate with my reviewers, and indeed I believe I may tell
you that I never wrote to thank anyone before on these grounds. I
could not thank anyone for praising me--I would not thank him for
praising me against his conscience; and if he praised me to the
measure of his conscience only, I should have little (as far as the
praise went) to thank him for. Therefore I do not thank you for the
praise in your article, but for the kind cordial spirit which pervades
both praise and blame, for the willingness in praising, and for the
gentleness in finding fault; for the encouragement without unseemly
exaggeration, and for the criticisms without critical scorn. Allow me
to thank you for these things and for the pleasure I have received by
their means. I am bold to do it, because I hear that you confess the
reviewership; and am the bolder, because I recognised your hand in
an act of somewhat similar kindness in the 'Athenaeum' at the first
appearance of the poems.

While I am writing of the 'New Quarterly,' I take the liberty of
making a remark, not of course in relation to myself--I know too well
my duty to my judges--but to your view of the Vantage ground of the
poetesses of England. It is a strong impression with me that previous
to Joanna Baillie there was no such thing in England as a poetess;
and that so far from triumphing over the rest of the world in that
particular product, we lay until then under the feet of the world.
We hear of a Marie in Brittany who sang songs worthy to be mixed with
Chaucer's for true poetic sweetness, and in Italy a Vittoria Colonna
sang her noble sonnets. But in England, where is our poetess before
Joanna Baillie--poetess in the true sense? Lady Winchilsea had an
_eye_, as Wordsworth found out; but the Duchess of Newcastle had
more poetry in her--the comparative praise proving the negative
position--than Lady Winchilsea. And when you say of the French, that
they have only epistolary women and wits, while we have our Lady Mary,
why what would Lady Mary be to us _but_ for her letters and her wit?
Not a poetess, surely! unless we accept for poetry her graceful _vers
de societe_.

Do forgive me if an impulse has carried me too far. It has been long
'a fact,' to my view of the matter, that Joanna Baillie is the first
female poet in all senses in England; and I fell with the whole weight
of fact and theory against th