Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/88

72 rather under the whole, if I myself am not tame about the 'Seraphim,' it is because I am the person interested. I wonder to myself sometimes, in a climax of dissatisfaction, how I came to publish it. It is a failure, in my own eyes; and if it were not for the poems of less pretension in its company, would have fallen, both probably and deservedly, a dead weight from the press." In a further epistle, dated in December, she confesses curiosity to know whom it is Mr. Horne now, with some mystery, is wishing her to write on. "Not Dr. Pusey!" she exclaims. "Thank you for the 'not.' And not a political economist, I hope—not a mathematician, nor a man of science—such a one as Babbage, for instance, to undo me." "I am a little beset with business just now," she continues, "being on the verge of getting another volume into print—with one or two long poems struggling for completion at my hands, in order to a subsequent falling upon the printer's."

Later letters continue to discuss the merits and demerits of various authors omitted from, or commented upon, in A New Spirit of the Age. Several female contemporary writers are passed in review, and then the novelists come under notice. Here, as everywhere, Miss Barrett does not hesitate to express her own opinions, although they may differ widely from her editor's. "It appears to me," she remarks, "that you cultivate scorn for the novel-readers, or else have no comprehension for them, dividing them into classes of Godwin-readers, Fielding-readers, Richardson-readers, James-readers, and so forth. You have no sympathy for persons who, when they were children, beset everybody in the house, from the proprietor to the second housemaid, to 'tell them a story,' and retain so much