how a whole life may seem rumpled up and creased--torn for the moment;
only you will live it smooth again, dear Mr. Chorley--take courage. You
have time and strength and good aims, and human beings have been happy
with much less. I understate your advantages on purpose, you see. I
heard you talked of in Florence when Miss Cushman, in the quarter of an
hour she gave us at Casa Guidi, told us of the oath she had in heaven to
bring out your play and make it a triumph. How she praised the play, and
you! Twice I have spoken with her--once on a balcony on the boulevard,
when together we saw Louis Napoleon enter Paris in immediate face of the
empire, and that once in Florence. I like the 'manly soul' in her face
and manners. Manly, not masculine--an excellent distinction of Mrs.
Jameson's. By the way, we hear wonderful things of the portrait painted
of Miss Cushman at Rome by Mr. Page the artist, called 'the American
Titian' by the Americans....

There I stop, not to 'fret' you beyond measure. Besides, now that you
Czars of the 'Athenæum' have set your Faradays on us, ukase and knout,
what Pole, in the deepest of the brain, would dare to have a thought on
the subject? Now that Professor Faraday has 'condescended,' as the
'Literary Gazette' affectingly puts it (and the condescension is
sufficiently obvious in the letter--'how we stoop!')--now that Professor
Faraday has condescended to explain the whole question--which had
offered some difficulty, it is admitted, to 'hundreds of intelligent
men, including five or six eminent men of science,' in Paris, and, we
may add, to thousands of unintelligent men elsewhere, including the
eminent correspondent of the 'Literary Gazette'--let us all be silent
for evermore. For my part, I won't say that Lord Bacon would have
explained any question to a child even without feeling it to be an act
of condescension. I won't hint under my breath that Lord Bacon
reverenced every _fact_ as a footstep of Deity, and stooped to pick up