is, I have been every way
relieved of it'!--And when I got home, next morning, I made a dark
pocket in my russet horror of a portfolio give up its dead, and there
fronted me 'Only a Player-girl' (the real title) and the sayings and
doings of her, and the others--such others! So I made haste and just
tore out one sample-page, being Scene the First, and sent it to our
friend as earnest and proof I had not been purely dreaming, as might
seem to be the case. And what makes me recall it now is, that it was
Russian, and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and
fish-pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the back ground. And in
Chorley's _Athenaeum_ of yesterday you may read a paper of _very_
simple moony stuff about the death of Alexander, and that Sir James
Wylie I have seen at St. Petersburg (where he chose to mistake me for
an Italian--'M. l'Italien' he said another time, looking up from his
cards).... So I think to tell you.

Now I may leave off--I shall see you start, on Tuesday--hear perhaps
something definite about your travelling.

Do you know, 'Consuelo' wearies me--oh, wearies--and the fourth volume
I have all but stopped at--there lie the three following, but who
cares about Consuelo after that horrible evening with the Venetian
scamp, (where he bullies her, and it does answer, after all she says)
as we say? And Albert wearies too--it seems all false, all
writing--not the first part, though. And what easy work these
novelists have of it! a Dramatic poet has to _make_ you love or admire
his men and women,--they must _do_ and _say_ all that you are to see
and hear--really do it in your face, say it in your ears, and it is
wholly for _you_, in _your_ power, to _name_, characterize and so
praise or blame, _what_ is so said and done ... if you don't perceive
of yourself, there is no standing by, for the Author, and telling you.
But with these novelists, a scrape of the pen--out blurting of a
phrase, and the miracle is achieved--'Consuelo possessed to perfection
this and the other gift'--what would you more? Or, to leave dear
George Sand, pray think of Bulwer's beginning a 'character' by
informing you that lone, or somebody in 'Pompeii,' 'was endowed with
_perfect_ genius'--'genius'! What though the obliging informer might
write his fingers off before he gave the pitifullest proof that the
poorest spark of that same, that genius, had ever visited _him_?
_Ione_ has it '_perfectly_'--perfectly--and that is