dom escapes in his
heroines, and which in some degree impaired the impression that
character, in many respects beautifully conceived and drawn, would have
produced? Well, there is a vein of something similar in Mrs. ----'s
mind, and to me it taints more or less everything it touches. She showed
me the other day an etching of Eve, from one of Raphael's compositions.
The figure, of course, was naked, and being of the full, round,
voluptuous, Italian order, I did not admire it,--the antique Diana,
drawing an arrow from her quiver, her short drapery blown back from her
straight limbs by her rapid motion, being my ideal of beauty in a
womanly shape. "Ah, but," said Mrs. ----, "look at the inimitable
_coquetry_ of her whole air and posture: how completely she seems to
know, as she looks at the man, that he can't resist her!" (It strikes me
that that whole sentence ought to be in French.) Now, this is not at all
my notion of Eve; even when she damned Adam and all the generations of
men, I think she was more innocent than this. I imagine her like an
eager, inquisitive, greedy child, with the fruit, whatever it was, part
in her hand and part between her teeth, holding up her hand, or perhaps
her mouth, to Adam. You see my idea of Eve is a sensual, self-willed,
ignorant savage, who saw something beautiful, that smelt good, and
looked as if it tasted good, and so tasted it, without any aspiration
after any other knowledge. This real innate fleshly devil of greediness
and indiscretion would, however, not bear the heavy theological
superstruction that has been raised upon it, and therefore a desire for
forbidden knowledge is made to account for the woman's sin and the
sorrows of all her female progeny. To me this merely sensual sin, the
sin of a child, seems much more picturesque, a good deal fitter for the
purposes of art, without the mystic and mythical addition of an
intellectual desire for knowledge and the agency of the Satanic
serpent. Alas! the mere flesh is devil enough, and serves for all the
consequences.

Blackwood will publish my verses, and, I believe, pay me well for them;
indeed, I shall consider any payment at all good enough for such
trumpery.

Good-bye, dear.

I am ever yours,
FANNY.

My dearest Dorothea, or the Virgin Martyr, I make a courtesy to you. [By
this title of a play of Massinger's I used frequently to add