for, as I should otherwise have begged you to review it in
the Edinburgh.[91] It is really deserving of much praise, and a
favourable critique in the E.R. would but do it justice, and set it
up before the public eye where it ought to be.

"How are you? and where? I have not the most distant idea what I am
going to do myself, or with myself--or where--or what. I had, a few
weeks ago, some things to say that would have made you laugh; but
they tell me now that I must not laugh, and so I have been very
serious--and am.

"I have not been very well--with a _liver_ complaint--but am much
better within the last fortnight, though still under Iatrical
advice. I have latterly seen a little of * * * *

"I must go and dress to dine. My little girl is in the country,
and, they tell me, is a very fine child, and now nearly three
months old. Lady Noel (my mother-in-law, or, rather, _at_ law) is
at present overlooking it. Her daughter (Miss Milbanke that was)
is, I believe, in London with her father. A Mrs. C. (now a kind of
housekeeper and spy of Lady N.'s) who, in her better days, was a
washerwoman, is supposed to be--by the learned--very much the
occult cause of our late domestic discrepancies.

"In all this business, I am the sorriest for Sir Ralph. He and I
are equally punished, though _magis pares quam similes_ in our
affliction. Yet it is hard for both to suffer for the fault of one,
and so it is--I shall be separated from my wife; he will retain
his.

"Ever," &c.

[Footnote 91: My reply to this part of his letter was, I find, as
follows:--"With respect to Hunt's poem, though it is, I own, full of
beauties, and though I like himself sincerely, I really could not
undertake to praise it _seriously_. There is so much of the _quizzible_
in all he writes, that I never can put on the proper pathetic face in
reading him."]

* * * * *

In my reply to this letter, written a few days after, there is a passage
which (though containing an opinion it might have been more prudent,
perhaps, to conceal,) I feel myself called upon to extract on account of
the singularly generous avowal,--honourable alike to both the parties in
this unhappy affair,--which it was the means of drawing from Lord Byron.
The following are my words:--"I am much in the same state as yourself
with respect to