clubs are intended for
that laudable and necessary purpose, and do not need educational
pretences or flourishes. Do not let them be afraid or ashamed of wanting
to be amused and pleased.

[Sidenote: The Lord Chief Baron.]

57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 15th, 1864._

MY DEAR CHIEF BARON,

Many thanks for your kind letter, which I find on my return from a
week's holiday.

Your answer concerning poor Thackeray I will duly make known to the
active spirit in that matter, Mr. Shirley Brooks.

Your kind invitation to me to come and see you and yours, and hear the
nightingales, I shall not fail to discuss with Forster, and with an eye
to spring. I expect to see him presently; the rather as I found a note
from him when I came back yesterday, describing himself somewhat
gloomily as not having been well, and as feeling a little out of heart.

It is not out of order, I hope, to remark that you have been much in my
thoughts and on my lips lately? For I really have not been able to
repress my admiration of the vigorous dignity and sense and spirit, with
which one of the best of judges set right one of the dullest of juries
in a recent case.

Believe me ever, very faithfully yours.

[Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.]

57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 29th, 1864._

MY DEAR FORSTER,

I meant to write to you last night, but to enable Wills to get away I
had to read a book of Fitzgerald's through before I went to bed.

Concerning Eliot, I sat down, as I told you, and read the book through
with the strangest interest and the highest admiration. I believe it to
be as honest, spirited, patient, reliable, and gallant a piece of
biography as ever was written, the care and pains of it astonishing, the
completeness of it masterly; and what I particularly feel about it is
that the dignity of the man, and the dignity of the book that tells
about the man, always go together, and fit each other. This same quality
has always impressed me as the great leading speciality of the
Goldsmith, and enjoins sympathy with the subject, knowledge of it, and
pursuit of it in its own spirit; but I think it even more remarkable
here. I declare that apart from the interest of having been so put into
the time, and enabled to understand it, I personally feel quite as much
the credit and honour done to literature by such a book. It quite clears
out of the remembrance a t