actors in the drama should be for ever a secret. Both these
objects you have attained. It is impossible I think, for any one to read
the book about to be published, without being impressed with the truth
of the moral it is intended to convey, and without seeing, by a thousand
infallible signs, that its spring and its general course have flowed
from reality and not fiction. Yet have you, by a few light alterations
and addition, managed to effect that concealment of names and persons,
which is due no less to the living than to the memory of the dead.

"So far I thank you from my heart: but in one point you have utterly
failed. You have done no justice to the noble character you meant to
delineate under the name of Godolphin; you have drawn his likeness with
a harsh and cruel pencil; you have enlarged on the few weaknesses he
might have possessed, until you have made them the foreground of the
portrait; and his vivid generosity, his high honour, his brilliant
intellect, the extraordinary stores of his mind, you have left in
shadow. Oh, God! that for such a being such a destiny was reserved! and
in the prime of life, just when his mind had awakened to a sense of its
own powers and their legitimate objects! What a fatal system of things,
that could for thirty-seven years have led away, by the pursuits and
dissipations of a life suited but to the beings be despised, a genius of
such an order, a heart of such tender emotions!(1) But on this subject I
cannot, cannot write. I must lay down the pen: to-morrow I will try and
force myself to resume it.

"Well, then, I say, you have not done justice to him. I beseech you to
remodel that character, and atone to the memory of one, whom none ever
saw but to admire, or knew but to love.

"Of me,--of me, the vain, the scheming, the proud, the unfeminine
cherishes of bitter thoughts, of stern designs,--of me, on the other
hand, how flattering is the picture you have drawn! In that flattery
is my sure disguise; therefore, I will not ask you to shade it into the
poor and unlovely truth. But while, with agony and shame, I feel that
you have rightly described that seeming neglectfulness of one no more,
which sprang from the pride that believed itself neglected, you have not
said enough--no, not one millionth part enough--of the real love that
I constantly bore to him: the only soft and redeeming portion of my
nature. But who can know, who can describe what another feels? Even I
knew not wha