s in my own. I also had your other two
Copies of Olympia: one of which I sent to Cowell, who is always too busy
to write to me, except about twice a year, in his Holydays.

I am quite content to take History as you do, that is, as the
Squire-Carlyle presents it to us; not looking the Gift Horse in the
Mouth. Also, I am sure you are quite right about the Keats' Letters. I
hope I should have revolted from the Book had anything in it detracted
from the man: but all seemed to me in his favour, and therefore I did not
feel I did wrong in having the secret of that heart opened to me. I hope
Mr. Lowell will not resent my thinking he might so far sympathize with
me. In fact, could he, could you, resist taking up, and reading, the
Letters, however doubtful their publication might have seemed to your
Conscience?

Now I enclose you a little work of mine {242} which I hope does no
irreverence to the Man it talks of. It is meant quite otherwise. I
often got puzzled, in reading Lamb's Letters, about some Data in his Life
to which the Letters referred: so I drew up the enclosed for my own
behoof, and then thought that others might be glad of it also. If I set
down his Miseries, and the one Failing for which those Miseries are such
a Justification, I only set down what has been long and publickly known,
and what, except in a Noodle's eyes, must enhance the dear Fellow's
character, instead of lessening it. 'Saint Charles!' said Thackeray to
me thirty years ago, putting one of C. L.'s letters {243} to his
forehead; and old Wordsworth said of him: 'If there be a Good Man,
Charles Lamb is one.'

I have been interested in the Memoir and Letters of C. Sumner: a
thoroughly sincere, able, and (I should think) affectionate man to a few;
without Humour, I suppose, or much artistic Feeling. You might like to
look over a slight, and probably partial, Memoir of A. de Musset, by his
Brother, who (whether well or ill) leaves out the Absinthe, which is
generally supposed to have shortened the Life of that man of Genius.
Think of Clarissa being one of his favourite Books; he could not endure
the modern Parisian Romance. It reminded me of our Tennyson (who has
some likeness, 'mutatis mutandis' of French Morals, Absinthe, etc., to
the Frenchman)--of his once saying to me of Clarissa, 'I love those
large, still, Books.'

I parted from Doudan with regret; that is, from two volumes of him; all I
had: but I think I see four quoted. That is pr