“Here is a tit-bit of information to you respecting publishers and public taste. One of ——’s best novelists writes to me thus: ‘You are not aware, perhaps, that my publisher employs supervisors, who strike out anything like dissertation, crying out ever for bustle and incident, the more thickly clustered the better. Novel readers, say these gentry, are impatient of anything else; and they who have created this depraved appetite must continue to minister to it.
“I have been amused by reading in the Atlas that I resemble Leigh Hunt very much both in my handwriting and character, both being ‘elegant pragmatics.’ A most queer fish, whose book and epistle will make you laugh when you come here next, calls me, in verse, ‘a man of Helicon.’ ‘Elegant Pragmatic’ I think pleases me better.
“I am now working at the Peninsular War. Canga Arguelles has published a volume of
remarks upon the English histories of that war: it is in the main a jealous but
just vindication of his countrymen against Napier. In my case he has denied one or two unimportant
statements, for which my authorities are as good as his; and pointed out
scarcely any mistake except that of paper money, for stamps, in a case where
the people burnt those of the intrusive government. I am not a little pleased
to see that he has not discovered a single error of the slightest im-
| 48 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 55. |
“I am also in the last part of a queer poem for Allan Cunningham. The hay asthma keeps off and on with me, sometimes better sometimes worse, sometimes wholly suspended, and never much-to-be-complained of. As soon as my despatches are made up I shall set off with it, in the intention of bathing in the Greta, unless a shower should prevent me.
“God bless you!
