lly doing right! A good deed, you say, never
dies; but we cannot always know--I must rely on you. Yes, it is; I should
think, easy to suffer martyrdom when one is sure of one's cause! but then
one must be sure of it. I have done nothing lately but to repeat to
myself that saying of yours, No. 54, C. 7, P.S.; and it has consoled me,
I cannot say why, except that all wisdom consoles, whether it applies
directly or not:

"'For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that
they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.'

"I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that
saying--what suggested it. May not one be admitted to inspect the
machinery of wisdom? I feel curious to know how thoughts--real
thoughts--are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the
beginning of one (but we poor women can never put together even two of
the three ideas which you say go to form a thought): 'When a wise man
makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?' It has just
flitted through me.

"I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal. How
different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the thought
that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do reverence him).
But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet I do not feel
the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the desert, savage and
beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine a superior donkey
reclaimed from the heathen to be--a very superior donkey, I mean, with
great power of speech and great natural complacency, and whose
stubbornness you must admire as part of his mission. The worst is that no
one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile is
unfair and false. Is it not strange? I love Wordsworth best, and yet
Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?"

("Because," Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, "women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts
to Excellence and Nature's Inspiration.")

The letter pursued:

"I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends me.
I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in saying
we have none ourselves, and 'cackle' instead of laugh. It is true (of me,
at leas