nce in the
papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have
seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally
spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such
things) for humming-birds and fire-flies. A tree is a Magnolia, &c.--Can
I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's
erring creed"--which and other passages brought me back to the old
Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on the "The
Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me
strangely.

The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is
choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible
parallel,--as between a great empress and the inobtrusive quiet soul who
digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged Paraguay
mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender Latinity
to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Lander's unfeeling
allegorising away of honest Quixote! He may as well say Strap is meant
to symbolise the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that
act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady
Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean
the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the
contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge
Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at
the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might
not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them.
Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very
depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when
somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon
writing that unfortunate Second Part with the confederacies of that
unworthy duke and most contemptible duchess, Cervantes sacrificed his
instinct to his understanding.

We got your little book but last night, being at Enfield, to which place
we came about a month since, and are having quiet holydays. Mary walks
her twelve miles a day some days, and I my twenty on others. 'Tis all
holiday with me now, you know. The change works admirably.

For literary news, in my poor way, I have a one-act farce going to be
acted at the Haymarket; but when? is the question. 'Tis an extravaganza,
and like enough to