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426 of her! Well, she was an American and must have been strangely like my mother, who was also American, and Hunt's mother's people were loyalists while my mother's forbears were furiously anti-English from the very beginning of the discontent which ended in the Revolution. The Hunts were very poor when he was a small boy, and he relates that one night he was with his mother somewhere in the vicinity of Blackfriars' bridge when a wretched woman begged of them. His mother had no money to give but she told the woman to follow her and going into a small dark side street divested herself of the flannel petticoat and gave it to her. It was bitterly cold and rheumatism and long illness followed as a result of her action. Well, my mother did very many things far far greater than that. I remember after her death going into a native ranche one day, and the old woman of the house over eighty, got up from the stool where she sat over the fire and said, with the tears running from her eyes, "She always called me Mother when she came to see me, but she was my mother and the mother of us all and what shall we do now she has gone?" How many men—tens and hundreds of thousands of men—could say as much as you and I and Leigh Hunt of a mother whose memory they worship: but all this has no existence in the world of certain fictionists whose fictions are invariably hailed by the reviewers as the "real thing," as "true to life" and all that.

Well, this is a long enough screed. As for what you say about criticising one's friends of course I don't take it seriously: it is just your fun—an attempt to draw me out. If I were to take it seriously how if I were to ask you by way of retort—what would you say of the man on the bench who allowed his judgments to be swayed by his personal likes and dislikes? I take it that morally the reviewer of books is in the position of the man on the bench, that his brain and not his heart must decide and he has only to judge justly—and "damn the consequences."

Ever yours