tragedies, French and English, which we used to act in the nursery.  There was a French ‘hexameter’ tragedy on the subject of Regulus—­but I cannot even smile to think of it now, there are so many grave memories—­which time has made grave—­hung around it.  How I remember sitting in ‘my house under the sideboard,’ in the dining-room, concocting one of the soliloquies beginning

    Que suis je? autrefois un general Remain: 
    Maintenant esclave de Carthage je souffre en vain.

Poor Regulus!—­Can’t you conceive how fine it must have been altogether?  And these were my ‘maturer works,’ you are to understand, ... and ‘the moon was bright at ten o’clock at night’ years before.  As to the gods and goddesses, I believed in them all quite seriously, and reconciled them to Christianity, which I believed in too after a fashion, as some greater philosophers have done—­and went out one day with my pinafore full of little sticks (and a match from the housemaid’s cupboard) to sacrifice to the blue-eyed Minerva who was my favourite goddess on the whole because she cared for Athens.  As soon as I began to doubt about my goddesses, I fell into a vague sort of general scepticism, ... and though I went on saying ’the Lord’s prayer’ at nights and mornings, and the ‘Bless all my kind friends’ afterwards, by the childish custom ... yet I ended this liturgy with a supplication which I found in ‘King’s Memoirs’ and which took my fancy and met my general views exactly....  ’O God, if there be a God, save my soul if I have a soul.’  Perhaps the theology of many thoughtful children is scarcely more orthodox than this:  but indeed it is wonderful to myself sometimes how I came to escape, on the whole, as well as I have done, considering the commonplaces of education in which I was set, with strength and opportunity for breaking the bonds all round into liberty and license.  Papa used to say ...  ’Don’t read Gibbon’s history—­it’s not a proper book.  Don’t read “Tom Jones”—­and none of the books on this side, mind!’ So I was very obedient and never touched the books on that side, and only read instead Tom Paine’s ‘Age of Reason,’ and Voltaire’s ‘Philosophical Dictionary,’ and Hume’s ‘Essays,’ and Werther, and Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft ... books, which I was never suspected of looking towards, and which were not ‘on that side’ certainly, but which did as well.

How I am writing!—­And what are the questions you did not answer?  I shall remember them by the answers I suppose—­but your letters always have a fulness to me and I never seem to wish for what is not in them.

But this is the end indeed.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday Night.
[In the same envelope with the preceding letter.]

Ever dearest—­how you can write touching things to me; and how my whole being vibrates, as a string, to these!  How have I deserved from God and you all that I thank you for?  Too unworthy I am of all!  Only, it was not, dearest beloved, what you feared, that was ‘horrible,’ it was what you supposed, rather!  It was a mistake of yours.  And now we will not talk of it any more.