Swallowfield, Saturday Night.

I write you two notes at once, my dear friend, whilst the recollection of your conversation is still in my head and the feeling of your kindness warm on my heart.  To write, to thank you for a visit which has given me so much pleasure, is an impulse not to be resisted.  Pray tell Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch how delighted I am to make their acquaintance and how earnestly I hope we may meet often.  They are charming people.

Another motive that I had for writing at once is to tell you that the more I think of the title of the forthcoming book, the less I like it; and I care more for it, now that you are concerned in the matter, than I did before.  “Personal Reminiscences” sounds like a bad title for an autobiography.  Now this is nothing of the sort.  It is literally a book made up of favorite scraps of poetry and prose; the bits of my own writing are partly critical, and partly have been interwoven to please Henry Chorley and give something of novelty, and as it were individuality, to a mere selection, to take off the dryness and triteness of extracts, and give the pen something to say in the work as well as the scissors.  Still, it is a book founded on other books, and since it pleased Mr. Bentley to object to “Readings of Poetry,” because he said nobody in England bought poetry, why “Recollections of Books,” as suggested by Mr. Bennett, approved by me, and as I believed (till this very day) adopted by Mr. Bentley, seemed to meet exactly the truth of the case, and to be quite concession enough to the exigencies of the trade.  By the other title we exposed ourselves, in my mind, to all manner of danger.  I shall write this by this same post to Mr. Bennett, and get the announcement changed, if possible; for it seems to me a trick of the worst sort.  I shall write a list of the subjects, and I only wish that I had duplicates, and I would send you the articles, for I am most uncomfortable at the notion of your being taken in to purchase a book that may, through this misnomer, lose its reputation in England; for of course it will be attacked as an unworthy attempt to make it pass for what it is not....

Now if you dislike it, or if Mr. Bentley keep that odious title, why, give it up at once.  Don’t pray, pray lose money by me.  It would grieve me far more than it would you.  A good many of these are about books quite forgotten, as the “Pleader’s Guide” (an exquisite pleasantry), “Holcroft’s Memoirs,” and “Richardson’s Correspondence.”  Much on Darley and the Irish Poets, unknown in England; and I think myself that the book will contain, as in the last article, much exquisite poetry and curious prose, as in the forgotten murder (of Toole, the author’s uncle) in the State Trials.  But it should be called by its right name, as everything should in this world.  God bless you!

    Ever faithfully yours,

    M.R.M.