as to details; the least and lowest part of
the art, that of interesting you in his people, he has. And those
"Last Days of Kant," how affecting they are, and how thoroughly in
every line and in every thought, agree with him or not, (and in all
that relates to Napoleon I differ from him, as in his overestimate
of Wordsworth and of Coleridge), one always feels how thoroughly and
completely he is a gentleman as well as a great writer; and so much
has _that_ to do with my admiration, that I have come to tracing
personal character in books almost as a test of literary merit:
Charles Boner's "Chamois-Hunting," for instance, owes a great part
of its charm to the resolute truth of the writer, and a great
drawback from the attraction of "My Novel" seems to me to be derived
from the _blase_ feeling, the unclean mind from whence it springs,
felt most when trying after moralities.

Amongst your bounties I was much amused with the New York magazines,
the curious turning up of a new claimant to the
Louis-the-Seventeenth pretension amongst the Red Indians, and the
rappings and pencil-writings of the new Spiritualists. One should
wonder most at the believers in these two branches of faith, if that
particular class did not always seem to be provided most abundantly
whenever a demand occurs. Only think of Mrs. Browning giving the
most unlimited credence to every "rapping" story which anybody can
tell her! Did I tell you that the work on which she is engaged is a
fictitious autobiography in blank verse, the heroine a woman artist
(I suppose singer or actress), and the tone intensely modern? You
will see that "Colombe's Birthday" has been brought out at the
Haymarket. Mr. Chorley (Robert Browning's most intimate friend)
writes me word that Mrs. Martin (Helen Faucit, at whose persuasion
it was acted) told him that it had gone off "better than she
expected." Have you seen Alexander Smith's book, which is all the
rage just now? I saw some extracts from his poems a year and a half
ago, and the whole book is like a quantity of extracts put together
without any sort of connection, a mass of powerful metaphor with
scarce any lattice-work for the honeysuckles to climb upon. Keats
was too much like this; but then Keats was the first. Now this book,
admitting its merit in a certain way, is but the imitation of a