be sure, cold and heartless, light and changeable, ungenerous and calculating women in the world!—­that is sure.  But for the most part, they are only what they are made ... and far better than the nature of the making ... of that I am confident.  The loyal make the loyal, the disloyal the disloyal.  And I give no more discredit to those women you speak of, than I myself can take any credit in this thing—­I.  Because who could be disloyal with you ... with whatever corrupt inclination? you, who are the noblest of all?  If you judge me so, ... it is my privilege rather than my merit ... as I feel of myself.

Wednesday.—­All but the last few lines of all this was written before I saw you yesterday, ever dearest—­and since, I have been reading your third act which is perfectly noble and worthy of you both in the conception and expression, and carries the reader on triumphantly ... to speak for one reader.  It seems to me too that the language is freer—­there is less inversion and more breadth of rhythm.  It just strikes me so for the first impression.  At any rate the interest grows and grows.  You have a secret about Domizia, I guess—­which will not be told till the last perhaps.  And that poor, noble Luria, who will be equal to the leap ... as it is easy to see.  It is full, altogether, of magnanimities;—­noble, and nobly put.  I will go on with my notes, and those, you shall have at once ...  I mean together ... presently.  And don’t hurry and chafe yourself for the fourth act—­now that you are better!  To be ill again—­think what that would be!  Luria will be great now whatever you do—­or whatever you do not.  Will he not?

And never, never for a moment (I quite forgot to tell you) did I fancy that you were talking at me in the temper-observations—­never.  It was the most unprovoked egotism, all that I told you of my temper; for certainly I never suspected you of asking questions so.  I was simply amused a little by what you said, and thought to myself (if you will know my thoughts on that serious subject) that you had probably lived among very good-tempered persons, to hold such an opinion about the innocuousness of ill-temper.  It was all I thought, indeed.  Now to fancy that I was capable of suspecting you of such a manoeuvre!  Why you would have asked me directly;—­if you had wished ’curiously to enquire.’

An excellent solemn chiming, the passage from Dante makes with your ‘Sordello,’ and the ‘Sordello’ deserves the labour which it needs, to make it appear the great work it is.  I think that the principle of association is too subtly in movement throughout it—­so that while you are going straight forward you go at the same time round and round, until the progress involved in the motion is lost sight of by the lookers on.  Or did I tell you that before?

You have heard, I suppose, how Dickens’s ‘Cricket’ sells by nineteen thousand copies at a time, though he takes Michael Angelo to be ’a humbug’—­or for ‘though’ read ‘because.’  Tell me of Mr. Kenyon’s dinner and Moxon?