“My dear Patmore,—I have just seen the —— ——, and, notwithstanding your denial (if it is one) of the warm and eloquent review of a certain work in it, am persuaded that nobody now alive could have partiality enough to me (to say nothing of the glowing and forcible style), to write such honouring things but yourself.
“There! I have come to the point at once, and deny it if you can.
| R. PLUMER WARD. | 111 |
“Well, much as I have been gratified by it, I don’t know that it has made me much more your debtor, simply because I was so much so already for a thousand acts of kindness and proofs of good opinion.
“What pleases me most in this review is the handsome and forcible manner in which you vindicate my claim (laughed at by the flippant and very shallow ——) to be something more than a writer of novels of fashionable life. I cannot say I am much flattered to be so considered, and, in short, pretend to be an essayist, only in another form. I am, therefore, the more obliged to you.
“The —— —— disappointed me.
Not because I expected approbation, for I looked for the contrary, and was
surprised at the favour shown. My surprise was at the want of ability in it as
a criticism; at bad grammar in language, and at a strange, nay, gross mistake
as to the moral of ‘Sterling.’ Fr it says, that, because ‘Sterling’ fails in achieving what, with his
abilities and opportunities, he might have accomplished, Mr.
Ward’s moral fails too. Why, the very moral is, that,
notwithstanding ability and
| 112 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
“How far more correctly has the —— —— seized this, whoever may be the author. That it is you, however, unless you positively deny it more unambiguously than by saying, that, because you think it is the best of the critiques, it cannot be you, I must continue to opine.
“Pray put the matter frankly out of doubt, and so no more at present from your obliged friend,
