has such very few rewards for a great deal of hard excellent enduring work, and none, no reward, I do think, would he less willingly forego than your praise and sympathy.  But your opinion once expressed—­truth remains the truth—­so, at least, I excuse myself ... and quite as much for what I say now as for what was said then!  ‘King John’ is very fine and full of purpose; ‘The Noble Heart,’ sadly faint and uncharacteristic.  The chief incident, too, turns on that poor conventional fallacy about what constitutes a proper wrong to resist—­a piece of morality, after a different standard, is introduced to complete another fashioned morality—­a segment of a circle of larger dimensions is fitted into a smaller one.  Now, you may have your own standard of morality in this matter of resistance to wrong, how and when if at all.  And you may quite understand and sympathize with quite different standards innumerable of other people; but go from one to the other abruptly, you cannot, I think.  ’Bear patiently all injuries—­revenge in no case’—­that is plain.  ’Take what you conceive to be God’s part, do his evident work, stand up for good and destroy evil, and co-operate with this whole scheme here’—­that is plain, too,—­but, call Otto’s act no wrong, or being one, not such as should be avenged—­and then, call the remark of a stranger that one is a ’recreant’—­just what needs the slight punishment of instant death to the remarker—­and ... where is the way?  What is clear?

—­Not my letter! which goes on and on—­’dear letters’—­sweetest? because they cost all the precious labour of making out?  Well, I shall see you to-morrow, I trust.  Bless you, my own—­I have not half said what was to say even in the letter I thought to write, and which proves only what you see!  But at a thought I fly off with you, ’at a cock-crow from the Grange.’—­Ever your own.

Last night, I received a copy of the New Quarterly—­now here is popular praise, a sprig of it!  Instead of the attack I supposed it to be, from my foolish friend’s account, the notice is outrageously eulogistical, a stupidly extravagant laudation from first to last—­and in three other articles, as my sister finds by diligent fishing, they introduce my name with the same felicitous praise (except one instance, though, in a good article by Chorley I am certain); and with me I don’t know how many poetical cretins are praised as noticeably—­and, in the turning of a page, somebody is abused in the richest style of scavengering—­only Carlyle!  And I love him enough not to envy him nor wish to change places, and giving him mine, mount into his.

All which, let me forget in the thoughts of to-morrow!  Bless you, my Ba.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Wednesday.
[Post-mark, January 7, 1846.]