to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us
would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have
a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children
always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have
usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town.
Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus
_mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how
very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the
question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably
joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was
conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and
the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully
ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot
withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the
kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something
of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald
Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.

This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of
human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the
recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high
spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling
dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out
of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period
finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor
spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's
case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness
and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper
and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her,
that in her conversation, _elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait_--she