I cease to possess the means of tracing her vicissitudes of
feeling any farther. In consequence of some advice which I fancied it
my duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in the
world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate displeasure,
and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune
to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that
none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and
noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less
for it.

At that time her book was passing through the press. Without prejudice
to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly
unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among many other
reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out.
Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep
a conviction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of
inspiration. A practised book-maker, with entire control of her
materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent
and ingenious dissertation,--criticisms which quite take the
color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on
Shakspeare,--philosophic truths which she imagined herself to have
found at the roots of his conceptions, and which certainly come from no
inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a great amount of rubbish,
which any competent editor would have shovelled out of the way. But Miss
Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press
in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell
with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked
up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there,
and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the
hack critics of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I
suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen
in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely
to recognize an author's heart in it, or more utterly careless about
bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade. They could not
do otherwise. I never thought of blaming them. From the scholars and
critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for
a worthier appreciation, because many of the best of them have higher
cultivation and finer and deeper lit