Still, it is nearer the mark than my former efforts--fuller, stronger, more sustained--and one may be encouraged to push on to something worthier, for I don't feel as if I had done yet--no indeed.

I have had from Leigh Hunt a very pleasant letter of twenty pages, and I think I told you of the two from John Ruskin.

In America, also, there's great success, and the publisher is said to have shed tears over the proofs (perhaps in reference to the hundred pounds he had to pay for them), and the critics congratulate me on having worked myself clear of all my affectations, mannerisms, and other morbidities.
Even 'Blackwood' is not to be complained of, seeing that the writer evidently belongs to an elder school, and judges from his own point of view.

He is wrong, though, even in classical matters, as it seems to _me_.
I heard one of Thackeray's lectures, the one on George the Third, and thought it better than good--fine and touching.

To what is it that people are objecting?
At any rate, they crowd and pay.
Ah yes.