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 enough!  Zeus with the scales? with the false weights!

And now—­till Tuesday good-bye, and be willing to get well as (letting me send porter instead of flowers—­and beefsteaks too!) soon as may be! and may God bless you, ever dear friend.

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, August 11, 1845.]

But if it ‘hurts’ you to read and write ever so little, why should I be asked to write ... for instance ... ‘before Tuesday?’ And I did mean to say before to-day, that I wish you never would write to me when you are not quite well, as once or twice you have done if not much oftener; because there is not a necessity, ... and I do not choose that there should ever be, or seem a necessity, ... do you understand?  And as a matter of personal preference, it is natural for me to like the silence that does not hurt you, better than the speech that does.  And so, remember.

And talking of what may ‘hurt’ you and me, you would smile, as I have often done in the midst of my vexation, if you knew the persecution I have been subjected to by the people who call themselves (lucus a non lucendo) ‘the faculty,’ and set themselves against the exercise of other people’s faculties, as a sure way to death and destruction.  The modesty and simplicity with which one’s physicians tell one not to think or feel, just as they would tell one not to walk out in the dew, would be quite amusing, if it were not too tryingly stupid sometimes.  I had a doctor once who thought he had done everything because he had carried the inkstand out of the room—­’Now,’ he said, ’you will have such a pulse to-morrow.’  He gravely thought poetry a sort of disease—­a sort of fungus of the brain—­and held as a serious opinion, that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art—­which was true (he maintained) even of men—­he had studied the physiology of poets, ’quotha’—­but that for women, it was a mortal malady and incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances.  And then came the damnatory clause in his experience ... that he had never known ‘a system’ approaching mine in ‘excitability’ ...