magazine, and I wish 'by that same sign' I could invoke
your presence and advice on a letter I received this morning. You
never would guess what it is, and you will wonder when I tell you that
it offers a request from the _Leeds Ladies' Committee_, authorised and
backed by the London _General Council of the League_, to your cousin
Ba, that she would write them a poem for the Corn Law Bazaar to be
holden at Covent Garden next May. Now my heart is with the cause, and
my vanity besides, perhaps, for I do not deny that I am pleased with
the request so made, and if left to myself I should be likely at once
to say 'yes,' and write an agricultural-evil poem to complete the
factory-evil poem into a national-evil circle. And I do not myself
see how it would be implicating my name with a political party to the
extent of wearing a badge. The League is not a party, but 'the meeting
of the waters' of several parties, and I am trying to persuade papa's
Whiggery that I may make a poem which will be a fair exponent of the
actual grievance, leaving the remedy free for the hands of fixed-duty
men like him, or free-trade women like myself. As to wearing the badge
of a party, either in politics or religion, I may say that never in my
life was I so far from coveting such a thing. And then poetry breathes
in another outer air. And then there is not an existent set of
any-kind-of-politics I could agree with if I tried--_I_, who am a
sort of fossil republican! You shall see the letters when you
come. Remember what the 'League' newspaper said of the 'Cry of the
Children.'

Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.

[Footnote 128: Evidently a slip of the pen for Douglas Jerrold, whose
'Shilling Magazine' began to come out in 1845.]

_To Miss Commeline_
50 Wimpole Street: [February-March 1845].

My dear Miss Commeline,--I do hope that you will allow me to appear
to remember you as I never have ceased to do in reality, and at a time
when sympathy of friends is generally acceptable, to offer you mine
as if I had some right of friendship to do so. And I am encouraged the
more to attempt this because I never shall forget that in the hour of
the bitterest agony of my life your brother wrote me a letter which,
although I did not read it, I was too ill and distracted, I was yet
shown the outside of some months afterwards and enabled to appreciate
the sympathy fully. Such a kindness could not fail to keep alive in
me (if the need of keeping alive _were_!