' warm me, yet in this cold
climate nobody wears red to comfort one's eye save soldiers and fox
hunters, and old women fresh from a Parish Christmas Distribution of
cloaks. To dress in floating loose crimson silk, I almost understand
being a Cardinal! Do you know anything of Nat Lee's Tragedies? In one
of them a man angry with a Cardinal cries--

Stand back, and let me mow this poppy down,
This rank red weed that spoils the Churches' corn.

Is not that good? and presently, when the same worthy is poisoned
(that is the Cardinal)--they bid him--'now, Cardinal, lie down and
roar!'

Think of thy scarlet sins!

Of the justice of all which, you will judge with no Mrs. Jameson for
guide when we see the Sistina together, I trust! By the way, yesterday
I went to Dulwich to see some pictures, by old Teniers, Murillo,
Gainsborough, Raphael!--then twenty names about, and last but one, as
if just thought of, 'Correggio.' The whole collection, including 'a
_divine_ picture by Murillo,' and Titian's Daughter (hitherto supposed
to be in the Louvre)--the whole I would, I think, have cheerfully
given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing--so execrable
as sign-paintings even! 'Are there worse poets in their way than
painters?' Yet the melancholy business is here--that the bad poet goes
out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order
to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do
afterwards--but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning
even how to produce such monstrosities as these, and to what other
good do his acquisitions go? This short minute of life our one chance,
an eternity on either side! and a man does not walk whistling and
ruddy by the side of hawthorn hedges in spring, but shuts himself up
and conies out after a dozen years with 'Titian's Daughter' and,
there, gone is his life, let somebody else try!

I have tried--my trial is made too!

To-morrow you shall tell me, dearest, that Mrs. Jameson wondered to
see you so well--did she not wonder? Ah, to-morrow! There is a lesson
from all this writing and mistaking and correcting and being
corrected; and what, but that a word goes safely only from lip to lip,
dearest? See how the cup slipped from the lip and snapped the
chrystals, you say! But the writing is but for a time--'a time and
times and half a time!'--would I knew when the prophetic weeks end!
Still, one day, as I say, no more writi