in other respects he is not much better, perhaps, than other men.  But for the base traffic of the affair—­I do not believe a word.  He is too generous—­has too much real sensibility.  I fought his battle, poor Orion.  ‘And so,’ she said ’you believe it possible for a disinterested man to become really attached to two women, heiresses, on the same day?’ I doubted the fact.  And then she showed me a note, an autograph note from the poet, confessing the M or N part of the business—­while Miss O or P confessed herself, said Miss Mitford.  But I persisted in doubting, notwithstanding the lady’s confessions, or convictions, as they might be.  And just think of Mr. Horne not having tact enough to keep out of these multitudinous scrapes, for those few days which on three separate occasions he paid Miss Mitford in a neighbourhood where all were strangers to him,—­and never outstaying his week!  He must have been foolish, read it all how we may.

And so am I, to write this ‘personal talk’ to you when you will not care for it—­yet you asked me, and it may make you smile, though Wordsworth’s tea-kettle outsings it all.

When your Monday letter came, I was reading the criticism on Hunt and his Italian poets, in the Examiner.  How I liked to be pulled by the sleeve to your translations!—­How I liked everything!—­Pulci, Pietro ... and you, best!

Yet here’s a naivete which I found in your letter!  I will write it out that you may read it—­

‘However it’ (the headache) ’was no sooner gone in a degree, than a worse plague came—­I sate thinking of you.’

Very satisfactory that is, and very clear.

May God bless you dearest, dearest!  Be careful of yourself.  The cold makes me languid, as heat is apt to make everybody; but I am not unwell, and keep up the fire and the thoughts of you.

Your worse ... worst plague

Your own

BA.

I shall hear? yes!  And admire my obedience in having written ’a long letter’ to the letter!

R.B. to E.B.B.

Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, February 11, 1846.]

My sweetest ‘plague,’ did I really write that sentence so, without gloss or comment in close vicinity?  I can hardly think it—­but you know well, well where the real plague lay,—­that I thought of you as thinking, in your infinite goodness, of untoward chances which had kept me from you—­and if I did not dwell more particularly on that thinking of yours, which became as I say, in the knowledge of it, a plague when brought before me with the thought of you,—­if I passed this slightly over it was for pure unaffected shame that I should take up the care and stop the ‘reverie serene’ of—­ah, the rhyme lets me say—­’sweetest eyes were ever seen’—­were ever seen!  And yourself confess, in the Saturday’s note, to having been ’unhappy for half an hour till’ &c. &c.—­and do not I feel that here, and am not I plagued by it?