to all manner of dress and gentlemanly appointment, and who can, if necessary, groom a horse not so badly, or at all events would rather do it all day long than succeed Mr. Fitzroy Kelly in the Solicitor-Generalship,—­such an one need not very much concern himself beyond considering the lilies how they grow.  But now I see you near this life, all changes—­and at a word, I will do all that ought to be done, that every one used to say could be done, and let ’all my powers find sweet employ’ as Dr. Watts sings, in getting whatever is to be got—­not very much, surely.  I would print these things, get them away, and do this now, and go to you at Pisa with the news—­at Pisa where one may live for some L100 a year—­while, lo, I seem to remember, I do remember, that Charles Kean offered to give me 500 of those pounds for any play that might suit him—­to say nothing of Mr. Colburn saying confidentially that he wanted more than his dinner ’a novel on the subject of Napoleon’!  So may one make money, if one does not live in a house in a row, and feel impelled to take the Princess’s Theatre for a laudable development and exhibition of one’s faculty.

Take the sense of all this, I beseech you, dearest—­all you shall say will be best—­I am yours—­

Yes, Yours ever.  God bless you for all you have been, and are, and will certainly be to me, come what He shall please!

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, September 16, 1845.]

I scarcely know how to write what is to be written nor indeed why it is to be written and to what end.  I have tried in vain—­and you are waiting to hear from me.  I am unhappy enough even where I am happy—­but ungrateful nowhere—­and I thank you from my heart—­profoundly from the depths of my heart ... which is nearly all I can do.

One letter I began to write and asked in it how it could become me to speak at all if ’from the beginning and at this moment you never dreamed of’ ... and there, I stopped and tore the paper; because I felt that you were too loyal and generous, for me to bear to take a moment’s advantage of the same, and bend down the very flowering branch of your generosity (as it might be) to thicken a little the fence of a woman’s caution and reserve.  You will not say that you have not acted as if you ’dreamed’—­and I will answer therefore to the general sense of your letter and former letters, and admit at once that I did state to you the difficulties most difficult to myself ... though not all ... and that if I had been worthier of you I should have been proportionably less in haste to ’bid you leave that subject.’  I do not understand how you can seem at the same moment to have faith in my integrity and to have doubt whether all this time I may not have felt a preference for another ... which you are ready ‘to serve,’ you say.  Which is generous in you—­but in me, where were the integrity?  Could you really hold me to be blameless, and do you think