very slowly. I send you a proof
of the Preface to the Dramatic Works (not knowing whether they have
sent you the sheets, or when they mean to bring it out). The few who
have seen this Introduction like it. It tells the truth about myself
and says no ill of other people. God bless you, dear friend. Say
everything for me to all friends, not forgetting Mr. Ticknor.

Ever yours, M.R.M.

Swallowfield, November 8, 1853.

My Very Dear Friend; Your letters are always delightful to me, even
when they are dated Boston; think what they will be when they are
dated London. In my last I sent you a very rough proof of my Preface
(I think Mr. Hurst means to call it Introduction), which you will
find autobiographical to your heart's content; I hope you will like
it. To-day I enclose the first rough draft of an account of my first
impression of Haydon. Don't print it, please, because I suppose they
mean it for a part of the Correspondence when it shall be published.
I looked out for those sixty-five long letters of Haydon's,--as
long, perhaps, each, as half a dozen of mine to you,--and doubtless
I have many more, but I was almost blinded by the dust in hunting up
those, my eyes having been very tender since I was shut up in a
smoky room for twenty-two weeks last winter. I find now that Messrs.
Longman have postponed the publication of the Correspondence in the
fear that it would injure the sale of the Memoirs, the book having
had a great success here. By the enclosed, which is as true and as
like as I could make it, you will see that he was a very brilliant
and charming person. I believe that next to having been heart-broken
by the committee and the heartlessness of his pupil ----, and
enraged by the passion for that miserable little wretch, Tom Thumb,
that the real cause of his suicide was to get his family provided
for. It succeeded. By one way and another they had L440 a year
between the four; but although the poor father never complained,
you will see by his book what a selfish wretch that ---- was.....

My tragedies are printed, and the dramatic scenes, forming, with the
preface, two volumes of above four hundred pages each. But I don't
think they are to come out till the prose work, and that is not a
quarter finished. I am always a most slow and laborious writer (that
Preface was written