thought strikes me with
horror. Pray heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying
chymical experiments upon her,--young female subjects are so scarce!
Louisa would make a capital shot. An't you glad about Burke's case? We
may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels--Hare, the
Great Un-hanged.

Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my
friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some,
alas! descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is
there anything new from the admired pen of the author of the _Pleasures
of Hope_? Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty
lately? Why sleeps the lyre of Hervey, and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse
of L.E.L. silent? Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last?
Curious construction! _Elaborata facilitas_! And now I'll tell. 'Twas
written for the "_Gem_;" but the editors declined it, on the plea that
it would _shock all mothers_; so they published "The Widow" instead. I
am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present world
calls delicacy. I thought "Rosamund Gray" was a pretty modest thing.
Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow
into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed,
"Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!"

_Erratum_ in sonnet:--Last line but something, for _tender_, read
_tend_. The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of
honest, plain, old writing lurking there still. They were not so
mealy-mouthed as to refuse my verses. Maybe, 'tis their oatmeal.

Blackwood sent me L20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next
day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first
putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, "All tailors are cheats, and all
men are tailors." Then I was better. [_Rest lost_.]

["Your four vols." Procter's poetical works, in three volumes, were
published in 1822. Since then he had issued _The Flood of Thessaly_,
1823. He was perhaps meditating a new one-volume selection.

"Anti-Capulets"--the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).

"Badman." Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle's friend Badams, a
manufacturer and scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the
philosopher spent some weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia
(see the _Early Recollections_).

"Burke's case." William Burke and William Hare, the body-snatchers and
murder