all, he did not escape either gratuitous distribution or literary correspondence in consequence. Certainly, if all his correspondents had possessed the epistolary talent of this one, he would have had nothing to regret at the failure of his plan. She writes:—
I have road and forwarded your letter to Miss Mitford, who tells me in a letter yesterday (a cross stitch) that, in spite of all I can say, she is glad of having written to you, because you "will be obliged to say something in your answer." Well! I also am glad that somebody is curious besides myself; and I am not sorry that the somebody should be herself, being jealous of her, "with Styx nine times round me," in natural proportion to her degree of glory and victory and twenty-five promised copies!
Very well, Mr. Horne!
"It is quite useless," said I to Miss Mitford, "that you should make your application! Have I not asked for six copies, and been refused?" Now carry the result of the application historically downwards—and me with it!
As to your suggestion about the compromise of her and my struggling heroically for these spolia opima—really you can know little of what heroes, female heroes, are made, to suggest such a thing! I have told Miss Mitford (to disabuse you at once) that not if she and you asked me on your four knees to touch a page of the twenty-five would I consent to such a thing. I make feminine oaths against it. I don't choose to do it. . . . Not in the least do I approve of your distributing the second edition in the manner of the first. The cause of it, and the object in it, are inscrutable to me, particularly as I don't hold to the common opinion that much poetry has made the author mad. Papa says, "Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania"—an ingenious conjecture, but not altogether satisfactory.
The letter from which these extracts are taken had not been written long before the writer began to fear that their humorous banter might be taken too seriously, so she indited another epistle about Orion, saying, "I am more sorry . . . at having written a very silly note to you. That it was simply silly—meaning that it wasn't seriously silly—I beg you to believe. I am apt to write, the thought or the jest
