ou very soon.
Give my very kind remembrance to Miss Holmes, and believe me,

Your affectionate friend,
E.B. BARRETT.

I saw Mr. Kenyon yesterday. He has a book just coming out.[35] I
should like you to read it. If you would, you would thank me for
saying so.

[Footnote 35: _Poems, for the most part occasional_, by John Kenyon.]

_To John Kenyon_[36]
[1838.]

Thank you, dearest Mr. Kenyon; and I should (and _shall_) thank Miss
Thomson too for caring to spend a thought on me after all the Parisian
glories and rationalities which I sympathise with by many degrees
nearer than you seem to do. We, in this England here, are just social
barbarians, to my mind--that is, we know how to read and write and
think, and even talk on occasion; but we carry the old rings in our
noses, and are proud of the flowers pricked into our cuticles. By so
much are they better than we on the Continent, I always think. Life
has a thinner rind, and so a livelier sap. And _that_ I can see in the
books and the traditions, and always understand people who like living
in France and Germany, and should like it myself, I believe, on some
accounts.

Where did you get your Bacchanalian song? Witty, certainly, but
the recollection of the _scores_ a little ghastly for the occasion,
perhaps. You have yourself sung into silence, too, all possible songs
of Bacchus, as the god and I know.

Here is a delightful letter from Miss Martineau. I cannot be so
selfish as to keep it to myself. The sense of natural beauty and the
_good_ sense of the remarks on rural manners are both exquisite of
their kinds, and Wordsworth is Wordsworth as she knows him. Have I
said that Friday will find me expecting the kind visit you promise?
_That_, at least, is what I meant to say with all these words.

Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.

[Footnote 36: John Kenyon (1784-1856) was born in Jamaica, the son
of a wealthy West Indian landowner, but came to England while quite
a boy, and was a conspicuous figure in literary society during the
second quarter of the century. He published some volumes of minor
verse, but is best known for his friendships with many literary men
and women, and for his boundless generosity and kindliness to all with
whom he was brought into contact. Crabb Robinson described him as a
man 'whose life is spent in making people happy.' He was a distant
cousin of Miss Barrett, and a friend of Robert Browning, who dedicated
to him his volume of 'Dramatic