and worstestest' on lines 13 and
14, my friend (slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box)
frankly declared himself bankrupt, and honourably incompetent, to
satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series!

What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest
opposite, and contrary images come together!

See now, how, of that 'Friendship' you offer me (and here Juliet's
word rises to my lips)--I feel sure once and for ever. I have got
already, I see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone
else's) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and
BRADBURY AND EVANS' READER were not! But you shall get something
better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with
me--hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real
relief, to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me,
and that stops me. Spring is to come, however!

If you hate writing to me as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I
pray you never write--if you do, as you say, care for anything I have
done. I will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep
earnest, _begin_ without affectation, God knows,--I do not know what
will help me more than hearing from you,--and therefore, if you do not
so very much hate it, I know I _shall_ hear from you--and very little
more about your 'tiring me.'

Ever yours faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Walpole Street: Feb. 3, 1845.
[Transcriber's Note: So in original. Should be "Wimpole Street."]

Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you
believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody (except
such professional letter writers as you and I are _not_), yet
everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and
contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from _you_
and to write to _you_, this talking upon paper being as good a social
pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened. As for
me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people
shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. Not
that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our
friend Mr. Horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere
romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to
by