Rodney House, Cheltenham : April 15.

I am truly glad you like Humboldt's letters so much. How necessary for appreciation of a book, scene, picture, society, is a certain previous adaptation of the frame of mind! Do you remember how little you cared for that book the first time of reading it in a smaller form. Experience, added light, and the aspect given by events which no purpose or control could have arranged, have given it now fresh meaning and made it a new book.

The difference which you remark between the moral effects of those two places is curious. The contemplative genius loci of the one I can comprehend, though it always impelled me to action, exercise and excursions; but the activity-exciting spirit of the other place I less readily can conceive. There is a certain sombreness there which rather invites to sadness, unless you rush to action in self-defence; and perhaps the air of civilisation reminds you there that you are in a world where the law is. Be busy about something. Now in a state of savagery, or anywhere that the march of contrivance and the teeming numbers of population urging to industry are shut out, life can more readily become a dream—a melancholy, but tender, and not rude dream.

Here in this place I find much altered: most of my intimate acquaintances are gone, married, buried, or estranged.

CLVIII.

Cheltenham.

Light reading and visiting old acquaintances have been my sole occupation here. I have finished 'Ruth' and 'Villette,' and several of Sir Walter Scott's, and am much struck by the marked difference between the fiction of his day and ours; the effect produced is very opposite. From those of Scott you rise with a vigorous, healthy tone of feeling; from the others, with that sense of exhaustion and weakness which comes from feeling stirred up to end in nothing. Scott's narratives run smoothly on with a profusion of information respecting the outer life of the days which he describes-the manners, customs, dress, modes of thought, and general feeling; but you have no glances

into the inner life-no throes and convulsions of conscienceno conflicts of Duty with Inclination-no mysteries of a soul treading wilfully? or compelled by circumstances, the dangerous, narrow border-land between right and wrong. Partly this is accounted for by the fact that in his stirring times life was an outer thing, and men were not forced into those mysterious problems which are pressing for solution now; and partly by another fact, that women have since then taken the lead in the world of literature, and imparted to fiction a new character. They are trying to aborder questions which men had looked upon as settled; and this might have been expected, from their being less able to understand or recognise the authority of statute law and conventional moralities than men, and much less disposed to acknowledge their eternal obligation, and also much more quick to feel the stirring laws of nature—mysterious, dim, but yet, in their way, even more sacred. The result of this has been, that questions which men would rather have left unexamined, or else approached with coarseness, are now the staple subjects of our modern fiction-'Jane Eyre,' 'Villette,' 'Ruth,' and many things in Margaret Fuller's writings; these, with the works of several American writers, as Hawthorne, in whom, though men, the woman movement has worked deeply, are the most remarkable of our modern novels, and characterise the commencement of an epoch. That great question, how far conventional law is to stifle the workings of inclination, and how far inclination-supposing it to be sacred and from our higher nature is justified in bidding it defiance, what a wide field that opens! It is a perilous question, and opens a door for boundless evil as well as good.

The French writers have said, as usual, with the full licence of a nation to whom Duty has no meaning, that the door is to be wide as hell; 'Evil, be thou my good,' seems to be the watchword of those that I have read. If they are right, God is a Being whose existence is as superfluous as a devil's. A sense of horrible materialism steals over me in reading their attempts to solve the problem, and the laws of materialism seem the only ones left to guide man. The 'constitution of man' must replace

the prophets, and a study of the cerebral laws of organisation sweep away the sanctions both of the Law and the Gospel. Mesmerism and Electro-biology must take the place of the New Testament, and les beaux sentiments become our compass instead of the Book of Life. Happily, the English novelists have approached the question with purer instincts and a more severely moral tone-witness 'Jane Eyre' and 'Ruth;' and yet they do open the question, and I rejoice to see it opened: yes, and more -opened by women, for I despair of men ever doing it with justice. The new divorce law, as proposed, refuses to the woman the right to divorce her husband, let his crimes be what they may, unless he adds brutal ill-treatment of her to crime. What hope is there from such a social state of feeling?

The worst, however, of the new tone in novel-writing is, that it sets one thinking in a way that can find no vent in action, and makes one dissatisfied with existing errors and institutions, without the slightest possibility of altering them; nay, or even knowing what alteration to desire. The result of this becoming general, may, perhaps, produce a restlessness which will issue in improvement; meantime, each must be content to bear his share of the unsatisfied restlessness which is hereafter to find such issue.

I am not well; I am suffering much, but it is of no use to talk about it. Nothing can be done except by attacking symptoms, and that is useless. The causes are irremediable, and they must go on working to their consummation.

CLIX.

Cheltenham.

To-morrow, by the early express, I return to work. I wish I could take another fortnight, for this rest has only done partial good. The chief good it has done me is in having shown me much more of staunch affection, unchilled through six years' absence, than I supposed was to be found in this light place. Certainly I have been surprised to find how warmly and truly many have cherished the remembrance of me. Five men here

I have found steady as steel to the magnet; and that, out of so few who remain, is a large number-all laymen.

It is not necessary to say that absence from Brighton is now impossible for some months to come; by August I shall be thoroughly tired again, I fear,—nay, if I were to search for a word to exactly express what I feel now, mentally and physically, I should select 'shattered.' In a literary point of view, I find Sir Walter Scott the most healthful restorative of any. There was no morbid spot in that strong manly heart and nature.

Brighton.

What a valuable gift it is to be able to take up the thread of thought as if it had never been broken! Scott had it. He would dictate two novels and to two amanuenses at once. With me a broken flow of thought will not gush again. I began with my mind full of thoughts. Now, after a long interruption, I feel exhausted and dissipated: the thing is gone from me, as the simple writers of early days expressed it. Moreover, the splitting headache has come back again; it returned on Saturday, as soon as I began to work; and on Sunday I could scarcely see for pain. I only took the morning pulpit, and preached an old Cheltenham sermon. All the evening I spent lying on the ground, my head resting on a chair.

I have been reading 'My Novel'-the first volume only as yet-the only work in the form of a tale I ever read which succeeded in introducing moral and political discussion, and even making the work practical by their introduction, without being tedious, tempting the reader to skip the politics and take the story; even Coningsby' failed in this. 'My Novel' weaves the tale and the doctrines inseparably together, and in a really masterly way. The discussion of the Parson and Riccabocca with Linney respecting the pamphlet with the motto 'Knowledge is power,' is very clever and interesting. The book breathes a sound, healthy tone of feeling, very different from Bulwer Lytton's earlier works. For instance, in page 204: 'He had been brought up from his cradle in simple love and reverence

for the Divine Father and the tender Saviour-Whose life, beyond all record of human goodness-Whose death beyond all epics of mortal heroism, no being whose infancy has been taught to supplicate the Merciful and adore the Holy- yea, even though his later life may be entangled amid the storms of dissolute pyrrhonism-can ever hear reviled and scoffed without a shock to the conscience and a revolt to the heart.'

Generally

Bulwer's mental career is a very peculiar one. minds exhaust themselves-the wine first, the lees afterwards; witness Sir Walter Scott after many years. But his was a strong nature. Commonly the indications of running dry, or repeating old views and character under new forms, show themselves after one or two works in the lady novelists this is very conspicuously so-so too in Hawthorne; in the voluminous James, of course. But here is Bulwer coming out with his last two novels as fresh and different from each other, and as racy and original, as if he had never written anything before.

CLX.

My dear I have read gratefully our most eloquent letter; but for the life of me I cannot make out the exact practical upshot of it. Beyond the direction to consult a 'fingerpost physician,' I read it through again and again for guidance in vain.

Well, as to that, I have not been so foolish as not to have done it long ago. I paid three guineas, foolishly, to three leading London physicians for an opinion. The first (—) prescribed, I forget what-some hash or other; the second threatened 'organic collapse of the brain,' and refused to prescribe anything save entire and total cessation from the pulpit for life. The third (-) recommended lettuce !

Here, Taylor recommended opiates. Allen and Whitehouse, men in whom I have profound confidence, say that all medicaments in my case are charlatanry. In Cheltenham, the only man I would trust in this particular case was away. A personal friend, a homœopathic physician, amused himself with giving