&c., less like the poor professional praise of the ‘craft’ than any other I ever met—­instance after instance starting into my mind as I write.  To his income I never heard him allude—­unless one should so interpret a remark to me this last time we met, that he had been on some occasion put to inconvenience by somebody’s withholding ten or twelve pounds due to him for an article, and promised in the confidence of getting them to a tradesman, which does not look like ‘boasting of his income’!  As for the heiresses—­I don’t believe one word of it, of the succession and transition and trafficking.  Altogether, what miserable ‘set-offs’ to the achievement of an ‘Orion,’ a ‘Marlowe,’ a ‘Delora’!  Miss Martineau understands him better.

Now I come to myself and my health.  I am quite well now—­at all events, much better, just a little turning in the head—­since you appeal to my sincerity.  For the coffee—­thank you, indeed thank you, but nothing after the ‘oenomel’ and before half past six. I know all about that song and its Greek original if Horne does not—­and can tell you—­, how truly...!

    The thirst that from the soul doth rise
      Doth ask a drink divine—­
    But might I of Jove’s nectar sup
      I would not change for thine! No, no, no!

And by the bye, I have misled you as my wont is, on the subject of wine, ’that I do not touch it’—­not habitually, nor so as to feel the loss of it, that on a principle; but every now and then of course.

And now, ‘Luria’, so long as the parts cohere and the whole is discernible, all will be well yet.  I shall not look at it, nor think of it, for a week or two, and then see what I have forgotten.  Domizia is all wrong; I told you I knew that her special colour had faded,—­it was but a bright line, and the more distinctly deep that it was so narrow.  One of my half dozen words on my scrap of paper ‘pro memoria’ was, under the ‘Act V.’ ’she loves’—­to which I could not bring it, you see!  Yet the play requires it still,—­something may yet be effected, though....  I meant that she should propose to go to Pisa with him, and begin a new life.  But there is no hurry—­I suppose it is no use publishing much before Easter—­I will try and remember what my whole character did mean—­it was, in two words, understood at the time by ’panther’s-beauty’—­on which hint I ought to have spoken!  But the work grew cold, and you came between, and the sun put out the fire on the hearth nec vult panthera domari!

For the ’Soul’s Tragedy’—­that will surprise you, I think.  There is no trace of you there,—­you have not put out the black face of it—­it is all sneering and disillusion—­and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word—­now wait and see and then say!  I will bring the first of the two parts next Saturday.

And now, dearest, I am with you—­and the other matters are forgotten already.  God bless you, I am ever your own R. You will write to me I trust?  And tell me how to bear the cold.