I think the much that they did, and did well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron.  Have you happened to see Bulwer’s King Arthur?  It astonished me very much.  I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain way, he would never be a poet.  Indeed, he is beginning poetry just at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off.  But he is a strange person, full of the powerful quality called will, and has produced a work which, although it is not at all in the fashionable vein and has made little noise, has yet extraordinary merit.  When I say that it is more like Ariosto than any other English poem that I know, I certainly give it no mean praise.

Everybody is impatient for Mr. George Ticknor’s work.  The subject seems to me full of interest.  Lord Holland made a charming book of Lope de Vega years ago, and Mr. Ticknor, with equal qualifications and a much wider field, will hardly fail of delighting England and America.  Will you remember me to him most gratefully and respectfully?  He is a man whom no one can forget.  As to Mr. Prescott, I know no author now, except perhaps Mr. Macaulay, whose works command so much attention and give so much delight.  I am ashamed to send you so little news, but I live in the country and see few people.  The day I caught my terrible Tic I spent with the great capitalist, Mr. Goldsmidt, and Mr. Cobden and his pretty wife.  He is a very different person from what one expects,—­graceful, tasteful, playful, simple, and refined, and looking absolutely young.  I suspect that much of his power springs from his genial character.  I heard last week from Mrs. Browning; she and her husband are at the Baths of Lucca.  Mr. Kenyon’s graceful book is out, and I must not forget to tell you that “Our Village” has been printed by Mr. Bohn in two volumes, which include the whole five.  It is beautifully got up and very cheap, that is to say, for 3 s. 6 d. a volume.  Did Mr. Whittier send his works, or do I owe them wholly to your kindness?  If he sent them, I will write by the first opportunity.  Say everything for me to your young friend, and believe me ever, dear Mr. F——­ most faithfully and gratefully yours, M.R.M.

1850.

    (No date.)

I have to thank you very earnestly, dear Mr. Fields, for two very interesting books.  The “Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal” are, I suppose, a sort of Lady Willoughby’s Diary, so well executed that they read like one of the imitations of Defoe,—­his “Memoirs of a Cavalier,” for instance, which always seemed to me quite as true as if they had been actually written seventy years before.  Thank you over and over again for these admirable books and for your great kindness and attention.  What a perfectly American name Peabody is!  And how strange it is that there should be in the United States so many persons of English descent whose names have entirely disappeared from the land