Here I have been reading Carlyle upon Cromwell and he is very fine, very much himself, it seems to me, everywhere.  Did Mr. Kenyon make you understand that I had said there was nothing in him but manner ...  I thought he said so—­and I am confident that he never heard such an opinion from me, for good or for evil, ever at all.  I may have observed upon those vulgar attacks on account of the so-called mannerism, the obvious fact, that an individuality, carried into the medium, the expression, is a feature in all men of genius, as Buffon teaches ...  ‘Le style, c’est l’homme.’  But if the whole man were style, if all Carlyleism were manner—­why there would be no man, no Carlyle worth talking of.  I wonder that Mr. Kenyon should misrepresent me so.  Euphuisms there may be to the end of the world—­affected parlances—­just as a fop at heart may go without shoestrings to mimic the distractions of some great wandering soul—­although that is a bad comparison, seeing that what is called Carlyle’s mannerism, is not his dress, but his physiognomy—­or more than that even.

But I do not forgive him for talking here against the ’ideals of poets’ ... opposing their ideal by a mis-called reality, which is another sort, a baser sort, of ideal after all.  He sees things in broad blazing lights—­but he does not analyse them like a philosopher—­do you think so?  Then his praise for dumb heroic action as opposed to speech and singing, what is that—­when all earnest thought, passion, belief, and their utterances, are as much actions surely as the cutting off of fifty heads by one right hand.  As if Shakespeare’s actions were not greater than Cromwell’s!—­

But I shall write no more.  Once more, may God bless you.

Wholly and only

Your BA.

R.B. to E.B.B.

                              Tuesday Morning.
                              [Post-mark, February 4, 1846.]

You ought hardly,—­ought you, my Ba?—­to refer to that letter or any expression in it; I had—­and have, I trust—­your forgiveness for what I wrote, meaning to be generous or at least just, God knows.  That, and the other like exaggerations were there to serve the purpose of what you properly call a crisis.  I did believe,—­taking an expression, in the note that occasioned mine, in connection with an excuse which came in the postscript for not seeing me on the day previously appointed, I did fully believe that you were about to deny me admittance again unless I blotted out—­not merely softened down—­the past avowal.  All was wrong, foolish, but from a good notion, I dare to say.  And then, that particular exaggeration you bring most painfully to my mind—­that does not, after all, disagree with what I said and you repeat—­does it, if you will think?  I said my other ‘likings’ (as you rightly set it down) used to ‘come