as I am always anxious to say) that when I make never so little an attempt, no wonder if I bungle notably—­’language,’ too is an organ that never studded this heavy heavy head of mine.  Will you not think me very brutal if I tell you I could almost smile at your misapprehension of what I meant to write?—­Yet I will tell you, because it will undo the bad effect of my thoughtlessness, and at the same time exemplify the point I have all along been honestly earnest to set you right upon ... my real inferiority to you; just that and no more.  I wrote to you, in an unwise moment, on the spur of being again ‘thanked,’ and, unwisely writing just as if thinking to myself, said what must have looked absurd enough as seen apart from the horrible counterbalancing never-to-be-written rest of me—­by the side of which, could it be written and put before you, my note would sink to its proper and relative place, and become a mere ‘thank you’ for your good opinion—­which I assure you is far too generous—­for I really believe you to be my superior in many respects, and feel uncomfortable till you see that, too—­since I hope for your sympathy and assistance, and ‘frankness is everything in such a case.’  I do assure you, that had you read my note, only having ‘known’ so much of me as is implied in having inspected, for instance, the contents, merely, of that fatal and often-referred-to ‘portfolio’ there (Dii meliora piis!), you would see in it, (the note not the portfolio) the blandest utterance ever mild gentleman gave birth to.  But I forgot that one may make too much noise in a silent place by playing the few notes on the ‘ear-piercing fife’ which in Othello’s regimental band might have been thumped into decent subordination by his ’spirit-stirring drum’—­to say nothing of gong and ophicleide.  Will you forgive me, on promise to remember for the future, and be more considerate?  Not that you must too much despise me, neither; nor, of all things, apprehend I am attitudinizing a la Byron, and giving you to understand unutterable somethings, longings for Lethe and all that—­far from it!  I never committed murders, and sleep the soundest of sleeps—­but ‘the heart is desperately wicked,’ that is true, and though I dare not say ‘I know’ mine, yet I have had signal opportunities, I who began life from the beginning, and can forget nothing (but names, and the date of the battle of Waterloo), and have known good and wicked men and women, gentle and simple, shaking hands with Edmund Kean and Father Mathew, you and—­Ottima!  Then, I had a certain faculty of self-consciousness, years and years ago, at which John Mill wondered, and which ought to be improved by this time, if constant use helps at all—­and, meaning, on the whole, to be a Poet, if not the Poet ... for I am vain and ambitious some nights,—­I do myself justice, and dare call things by their names to myself, and say boldly, this I love, this I hate, this I would