Ever your affectionate.

[Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.]

GAD'S HILL, _Thursday Night, Aug. 25th, 1859._

MY DEAR FORSTER,

Heartily glad to get your letter this morning.

I cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of
our brave and excellent friend the Chief Baron, in connection with that
ruffian. I followed the case with so much interest, and have followed
the miserable knaves and asses who have perverted it since, with so much
indignation, that I have often had more than half a mind to write and
thank the upright judge who tried him. I declare to God that I believe
such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and courage
can render to society. Of course I saw the beast of a prisoner (with my
mind's eye) delivering his cut-and-dried speech, and read in every word
of it that no one but the murderer could have delivered or conceived
it. Of course I have been driving the girls out of their wits here, by
incessantly proclaiming that there needed no medical evidence either
way, and that the case was plain without it. Lastly, of course (though a
merciful man--because a merciful man I mean), I would hang any Home
Secretary (Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise) who should step in between
that black scoundrel and the gallows. I can_not_ believe--and my belief
in all wrong as to public matters is enormous--that such a thing will be
done.

I am reminded of Tennyson, by thinking that King Arthur would have made
short work of the amiable ----, whom the newspapers strangely delight to
make a sort of gentleman of. How fine the "Idylls" are! Lord! what a
blessed thing it is to read a man who can write! I thought nothing could
be grander than the first poem till I came to the third; but when I had
read the last, it seemed to be absolutely unapproached and
unapproachable.

To come to myself. I have written and begged the "All the Year Round"
publisher to send you directly four weeks' proofs beyond the current
number, that are in type. I hope you will like them. Nothing but the
interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the
difficulty of the forms of treatment, nothing in the mere way of money,
I mean, could also repay the time and trouble of the incessant
condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque_
story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom
the story itself should express, more than