I can scarcely resign myself to it as a necessity, even now ...  I mean, to the act, as Luria’s act, whether it is final or not—­the act of suicide being so unheroical.  But you are a dramatic poet and right perhaps, where, as a didactic poet, you would have been wrong, ... and, after the first shock, I begin to see that your Luria is the man Luria and that his ‘sun’ lights him so far and not farther than so, and to understand the natural reaction of all that generous trust and hopefulness, what naturally it would be.  Also, it is satisfactory that Domizia, having put her woman’s part off to the last, should be too late with it—­it will be a righteous retribution.  I had fancied that her object was to isolate him, ... to make his military glory and national recompense ring hollowly to his ears, and so commend herself, drawing back the veil.

Puccio’s scornful working out of the low work, is very finely given, I think, ... and you have ‘a cunning right hand,’ to lift up Luria higher in the mind of your readers, by the very means used to pull down his fortunes—­you show what a man he is by the very talk of his rivals ... by his ‘natural godship’ over Puccio.  Then Husain is nobly characteristic—­I like those streaks of Moorish fire in his speeches.  ’Why ‘twas all fighting’ &c. ... that passage perhaps is over-subtle for a Husain—­but too nobly right in the abstract to be altered, if it is so or not.  Domizia talks philosophically besides, and how eloquently;—­and very noble she is where she proclaims

    The angel in thee and rejects the sprites
    That ineffectual crowd about his strength,
    And mingle with his work and claim a share!—­

But why not ‘spirits’ rather than ‘sprites,’ which has a different association by custom?  ‘Spirits’ is quite short enough, it seems to me, for a last word—­it sounds like a monosyllable that trembles—­or thrills, rather.  And, do you know, I agree with yourself a little when you say (as did you not say?) that some of the speeches—­Domizia’s for instance—­are too lengthy.  I think I should like them to coil up their strength, here and there, in a few passages.  Luria ... poor Luria ... is great and pathetic when he stands alone at last, and ’all his waves have gone over him.’  Poor Luria!—­And now, I wonder where Mr. Chorley will look, in this work,—­along all the edges of the hills,—­to find, or prove, his favourite ‘mist!’ On the glass of his own opera-lorgnon, perhaps:—­shall we ask him to try that?

But first, I want to ask you something—­I have had it in my head a long time, but it might as well have been in a box—­and indeed if it had been in the box with your letters, I should have remembered to speak of it long ago.  So now, at last, tell me—­how do you write, O my poet? with steel pens, or Bramah pens, or goose-quills or crow-quills?—­Because I have a penholder which was given to me when I was a child, and which I have used both then and since in the production