“Thank you a thousand times for your kind notice of my book. It would he impossible for any review to touch me as that has done: it brought back the last twelve years—it brought back the hour of intense anxiety, when the ‘Gazette’ lay for an hour upon my table, and yet I had not courage to cut the page—and when I read, I well remember the tears of pure joy that burst from my eyes; those feelings do not often return, but I hope they are never forgotten.
“To me, your name has ever borne the consciousness of wise friendship. You encouraged and cheered me; and I do not think I ever finished a chapter or a tale without wondering, ‘What the “Literary Gazette” would say of that!’
“I think you must enjoy, even at this season, when we all look back upon what we have lost, much real happiness from the knowledge that you have always fostered young talent, given circulation to opinions calculated to promote the influence of religion and morality, and never inflicted a careless wound on any living thing.
