do, this I would not do, under all kinds of circumstances,—­and talking (thinking) in this style to myself, and beginning, however tremblingly, in spite of conviction, to write in this style for myself—­on the top of the desk which contains my ‘Songs of the Poets—­NO.  I M.P.’, I wrote,—­what you now forgive, I know!  Because I am, from my heart, sorry that by a foolish fit of inconsideration I should have given pain for a minute to you, towards whom, on every account, I would rather soften and ‘sleeken every word as to a bird’ ... (and, not such a bird as my black self that go screeching about the world for ’dead horse’—­corvus (picus)—­mirandola!) I, too, who have been at such pains to acquire the reputation I enjoy in the world,—­(ask Mr. Kenyon,) and who dine, and wine, and dance and enhance the company’s pleasure till they make me ill and I keep house, as of late:  Mr. Kenyon, (for I only quote where you may verify if you please) he says my common sense strikes him, and its contrast with my muddy metaphysical poetry!  And so it shall strike you—­for though I am glad that, since you did misunderstand me, you said so, and have given me an opportunity of doing by another way what I wished to do in that,—­yet, if you had not alluded to my writing, as I meant you should not, you would have certainly understood something of its drift when you found me next Tuesday precisely the same quiet (no, for I feel I speak too loudly, in spite of your kind disclaimer, but—­) the same mild man-about-town you were gracious to, the other morning—­for, indeed, my own way of worldly life is marked out long ago, as precisely as yours can be, and I am set going with a hand, winker-wise, on each side of my head, and a directing finger before my eyes, to say nothing of an instinctive dread I have that a certain whip-lash is vibrating somewhere in the neighbourhood in playful readiness!  So ‘I hope here be proofs,’ Dogberry’s satisfaction that, first, I am but a very poor creature compared to you and entitled by my wants to look up to you,—­all I meant to say from the first of the first—­and that, next, I shall be too much punished if, for this piece of mere inconsideration, you deprive me, more or less, or sooner or later, of the pleasure of seeing you,—­a little over boisterous gratitude for which, perhaps, caused all the mischief!  The reasons you give for deferring my visits next week are too cogent for me to dispute—­that is too true—­and, being now and henceforward ’on my good behaviour,’ I will at once cheerfully submit to them, if needs must—­but should your mere kindness and forethought, as I half suspect, have induced you to take such a step, you will now smile with me, at this new and very unnecessary addition to the ‘fears of me’ I have got so triumphantly over in your case!  Wise man, was I not, to clench my first favourable impression so adroitly ... like a recent Cambridge worthy, my sister heard of; who, being on his theological (or rather,