enough! Zeus with
the scales? with the false weights!

And now--till Tuesday good-bye, and be willing to get well as (letting
me send _porter_ instead of flowers--and beefsteaks too!) soon as may
be! and may God bless you, ever dear friend.

R.B.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

[Post-mark, August 11, 1845.]

But if it 'hurts' you to read and write ever so little, why should I
be asked to write ... for instance ... 'before Tuesday?' And I did
mean to say before to-day, that I wish you never would write to me
when you are not _quite well_, as once or twice you have done if not
much oftener; because there is not a necessity, ... and I do not
choose that there should ever be, or _seem_ a necessity, ... do you
understand? And as a matter of personal preference, it is natural for
me to like the silence that does not hurt you, better than the speech
that does. And so, remember.

And talking of what may 'hurt' you and me, you would smile, as I have
often done in the midst of my vexation, if you knew the persecution I
have been subjected to by the people who call themselves (_lucus a non
lucendo_) 'the faculty,' and set themselves against the exercise of
other people's faculties, as a sure way to death and destruction. The
modesty and simplicity with which one's physicians tell one not to
think or feel, just as they would tell one not to walk out in the dew,
would be quite amusing, if it were not too tryingly stupid sometimes.
I had a doctor once who thought he had done everything because he had
carried the inkstand out of the room--'Now,' he said, 'you will have
such a pulse to-morrow.' He gravely thought poetry a sort of
disease--a sort of fungus of the brain--and held as a serious opinion,
that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art--which
was true (he maintained) even of men--he had studied the physiology of
poets, 'quotha'--but that for women, it was a mortal malady and
incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances.
And then came the damnatory clause in his experience ... that he had
never known 'a system' approaching mine in 'excitability' ... except
Miss Garrow's ... a young lady who wrote verses for Lady Blessington's
annuals ... and who was the only other female rhymer he had had the
misfortune of attending. And she was to die in two years, though she
was dancing quadrilles then (and has lived to