ting a
story. Some fragments of the manuscript yet remain, but it is in too
small a hand to be read without great fatigue to the eyes; and one cares
the less to read it, as she herself condemned it, in the preface to the
"Professor," by saying that in this story she had got over such taste as
she might once have had for the "ornamental and redundant in
composition." The beginning, too, as she acknowledges, was on a scale
commensurate with one of Richardson's novels, of seven or eight volumes.
I gather some of these particulars from a copy of a letter, apparently in
reply to one from Wordsworth, to whom she had sent the commencement of
the story, sometime in the summer of 1840.

"Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am
not so much attached to this but that I can give it up without much
distress. No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a
Richardsonian concern of it . . . I had materials in my head for half-
a-dozen volumes . . . Of course, it is with considerable regret I
relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched. It is
very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains,
and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have
no father nor mother but your own imagination . . . I am sorry I did
not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the 'Ladies' Magazine' was
flourishing like a green bay-tree. In that case, I make no doubt, my
aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement,
and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and
West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and
doings in double-columned close-printed pages . . . I recollect, when
I was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, and reading
them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure. You give a correct
description of the patient Grisels of those days. My aunt was one of
them; and to this day she thinks the tales of the 'Ladies' Magazine'
infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature. So do I; for I
read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of
admiration, but a very weak one of criticism . . . I am pleased that
you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney's clerk or a novel-
reading dress-maker. I will not help you at all in the discovery; and
as to my handwriting, or the ladylike to