such things--but I have _heard_. Heard from Mr. Kenyon; heard from
Miss Mitford; who however is passionately fond of the theatre as a
writer's medium--_not at all_, from Mr. Horne himself, ... except what
he has printed on the subject.

Yes--he has been infamously used on the point of the 'New
Spirit'--only he should have been prepared for the infamy--it was
leaping into a gulph, ... not to 'save the republic,' but '_pour
rire_': it was not merely putting one's foot into a hornet's nest, but
taking off a shoe and stocking to do it. And to think of Dickens being
dissatisfied! To think of Tennyson's friends grumbling!--he himself
did not, I hope and trust. For you, you certainly were not adequately
treated--and above all, you were not placed with your _peers_ in that
chapter--but that there was an intention to do you justice, and that
there _is_ a righteous appreciation of you in the writer, I know and
am sure,--and that _you_ should be sensible to this, is only what I
should know and be sure of _you_. Mr. Horne is quite above the narrow,
vicious, hateful jealousy of contemporaries, which we hear reproached,
too justly sometimes, on men of letters.

I go on writing as if I were not going to see you--soon perhaps.
Remember that the how and the when rest with you--except that it
cannot be before next week at the soonest. You are to decide.

Always your friend,

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Friday Night.
[Post-mark, May 17, 1845.]

My friend is not 'mistrustful' of me, no, because she don't fear I
shall make mainprize of the stray cloaks and umbrellas down-stairs, or
turn an article for _Colburn's_ on her sayings and doings
up-stairs,--but spite of that, she does mistrust ... _so_ mistrust my
common sense,--nay, uncommon and dramatic-poet's sense, if I am put on
asserting it!--all which pieces of mistrust I could detect, and catch
struggling, and pin to death in a moment, and put a label in, with
name, genus and species, just like a horrible entomologist; only I
won't, because the first visit of the Northwind will carry the whole
tribe into the Red Sea--and those horns and tails and scalewings are
best forgotten altogether. And now will I say a cutting thing and have
done. Have I trusted _my_ friend so,--or said even to myself, much
less to her, she is even as--'M