You sympathise tenderly with your executioner....
And as for the critics--yes, indeed, I agree with you that I have no reason to complain.

More than that, I confess to you that I am entirely astonished at the amount of reception I have met with--I who expected to be put in the stocks and pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years' 'singing birds' as a disorderly woman and freethinking poet! People have been so kind that, in the first place, I really come to modify my opinions somewhat upon their conventionality, to see the progress made in freedom of thought.

Think of quite decent women taking the part of the book in a sort of _effervescence_ which I hear of with astonishment.
In fact, there has been an enormous quantity of extravagance talked and written on the subject, and I _know it_--oh, I know it.

I wish I deserved some things--some things; I wish it were all true.

But I see too distinctly what I _ought_ to have written.