, and that in the
revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever. To
imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic
expression of more than thirty years' standing, would be to suppose him
indulging his "Pleasures of Memory" with a vengeance. You never penned a
line which for its own sake you need, dying, wish to blot. You mistake
your heart if you think you _can_ write a lampoon. Your whips are rods
of roses. [1] Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the
vicious,--abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are
sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a
compliment as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But
do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself. I
maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but _con
amore_; that if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was
not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with
scholar-like habits,--for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat
near of sight before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not
then plead the _obrepens senectus_. Did I not, moreover, make it an
apology for a certain _absence_, which some of your friends may have
experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a
casual street-meeting; and did I not strengthen your excuse for this
slowness of recognition by further accounting morally for the present
engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person,
make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever
made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by
my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware
of it. Does it follow that I should have expressed myself exactly in the
same way of those dear old eyes of yours _now_,--now that Father Time
has conspired with a hard taskmaster to put a last extinguisher upon
them? I should as soon have insulted the Answerer of Salmasius when he
awoke up from his ended task, and saw no more with mortal vision. But
you are many films removed yet from Milton's calamity. You write
perfectly intelligibly. Marry, the letters are not all of the same size
or tallness; but that only shows your proficiency in the _hands_--text,
german-hand, court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords variety. You
pen better than you did a twelvemonth ago; and if you co