Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, February 17, 1846.]

_Mechant comme quatre!_ you are, and not deserving to be let see the
famous letter--is there any grammar in _that_ concatenation, can you
tell me, now that you are in an arch-critical humour? And remember
(turning back to the subject) that personally she and I are strangers
and that therefore what she writes for me is naturally scene-painting
to be looked at from a distance, done with a masterly hand and most
amiable intention, but quite a different thing of course from the
intimate revelations of heart and mind which make a living thing of a
letter. If she had sent such to me, I should not have sent it to Mr.
Kenyon, but then, she would not have sent it to me in any case. What
she _has_ sent me might be a chapter in a book and has the life proper
to itself, and I shall not let you try it by another standard, even if
you wished, but you don't--for I am not so _bete_ as not to understand
how the jest crosses the serious all the way you write. Well--and Mr.
Kenyon wants the letter the second time, not for himself, but for Mr.
Crabb Robinson who promises to let me have a new sonnet of
Wordsworth's in exchange for the loan, and whom I cannot refuse
because he is an intimate friend of Miss Martineau's and once allowed
me to read a whole packet of letters from her to him. She does not
object (as I have read under her hand) to her letters being shown
about in MS., notwithstanding the anathema against all printers of the
same (which completes the extravagance of the unreason, I think) and
people are more anxious to see them from their presumed nearness to
annihilation. I, for my part, value letters (to talk literature) as
the most vital part of biography, and for any rational human being to
put his foot on the traditions of his kind in this particular class,
does seem to me as wonderful as possible. Who would put away one of
those multitudinous volumes, even, which stereotype Voltaire's
wrinkles of wit--even Voltaire? I can read book after book of such
reading--or could! And if her principle were carried out, there would
be an end! Death would be deader from henceforth. Also it is a wrong
selfish principle and unworthy of her whole life and profession,
because we should all be ready to say that if the secrets of our daily
lives and inner souls may instruct other surviving souls, let them be
open to men hereafter, even as they are to God now. Dust to