Smith, or Jane Jackson, late of this parish, was born, lived, and died worth enough money to pay a mason to distinguish their bones from those of the unrecorded millions.  To gratify Jansenius I waived this objection, and only interfered to save him from being fleeced and fooled by an unnecessary West End middleman, who, as likely as not, would have eventually employed the very man to whom I gave the job.  Even the epitaph was not mine.  If I had had my way I should have written:  “Henrietta Jansenius was born on such A date, married A man named Trefusis, and died on such another date; and now what does it matter whether she did or not?” The whole notion conveyed in the book that I rode rough-shod over everybody in the affair, and only consulted my own feelings, is the very reverse of the truth.

As to the tomfoolery down at Brandon’s, which ended in Erskine and myself marrying the young lady visitors there, I can only congratulate you on the determination with which you have striven to make something like a romance out of such very thin material.  I cannot say that I remember it all exactly as you have described it; my wife declares flatly there is not a word of truth in it as far as she is concerned, and Mrs. Erskine steadily refuses to read the book.

On one point I must acknowledge that you have proved yourself a master of the art of fiction.  What Hetty and I said to one another that day when she came upon me in the shrubbery at Alton College was known only to us two.  She never told it to anyone, and I soon forgot it.  All due honor, therefore, to the ingenuity with which you have filled the hiatus, and shown the state of affairs between us by a discourse on “surplus value,” cribbed from an imperfect report of one of my public lectures, and from the pages of Karl Marx!  If you were an economist I should condemn you for confusing economic with ethical considerations, and for your uncertainty as to the function which my father got his start by performing.  But as you are only a novelist, I compliment you heartily on your clever little pasticcio, adding, however, that as an account of what actually passed between myself and Hetty, it is the wildest romance ever penned.  Wickens’s boy was far nearer the mark.

In conclusion, allow me to express my regret that you can find no better employment for your talent than the writing of novels.  The first literary result of the foundation of our industrial system upon the profits of piracy and slave-trading was Shakspere.  It is our misfortune that the sordid misery and hopeless horror of his view of man’s destiny is still so appropriate to English society that we even to-day regard him as not for an age, but for all time.  But the poetry of despair will not outlive despair itself.  Your nineteenth century novelists are only the tail of Shakspere.  Don’t tie yourself to it:  it is fast wriggling into oblivion.