The "Sayings" are set off by delightful paper and print, and a binding which opens with inviting ease. I am really grateful to every one concerned in the volume, and am anxious that it should not be in any way a disappointment. The selections seem to me to be made with an exquisite sensibility to the various lights and shades of life; and all Mr. Main's letters show the same quality. It is a great help to me to have such an indication that there exist careful readers for whom no subtilest intention is lost.
We have both read the story of the "Megara" with the deepest interest; indeed, with a quite exceptional enjoyment of its direct, unexaggerated painting.
The prescription of two days' golfing per week will, I hope, keep up your condition to the excellent pitch at which it was on your return from Paris. Good news usually acts as a tonic when one's case is not too desperate; and I shall be glad if you and we can get it in the form of more success for "Middlemarch." Dickens's "Life," you see, finds a large public ready to pay more. But the British mind has long entertained the purchase of expensive biographies. The proofs lately given that one's books don't necessarily go out like lucifer matches, never to be taken up again, make one content with moderate immediate results, which perhaps are as much as can reasonably be expected for any writing which does not address itself either to fashions or corporate interests of an exclusive kind.
Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Jan. 1872.
It is like your kindness to write me your encouraging impressions on reading the third book. I suppose it is my poor health that just now makes me think my writing duller than usual. For certainly the reception of the first book by my old readers is quite beyond my most daring hopes. One of them, who is a great champion of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," told Mr. Lewes yesterday that he thought "Middlemarch" surpassed them. All this is very wonderful to me. I am thoroughly comforted as to the half of the work which is already written; but there remains the terror about the unwritten. Mr. Lewes is much satisfied with the fourth book, which opens with the continuation of the Featherstone drama.
We went yesterday to the Tichborne trial, which was an experience of great interest to me. We had to come away after the third hour of Coleridge's speaking; but it was a great enjoyment to me to hear what I did. Coleridge is a rare orator—not of the declamatory, but of the argumentative order.
Thanks, not formal, but sincerely felt, for the photographs. This likeness will always carry me back to the first time I saw you, in our little Richmond lodging, when I was thinking anxiously of "Adam Bede," as I now am of "Middlemarch."
I felt something like a shudder when Sir Henry Maine asked me last Sunday whether this would not be a very long book; saying, when I told him it would be four good volumes, that that was what he had calculated. However, it will not be longer than Thackeray's books, if so long. And I don't see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly.
I have to be grateful for the gift of "Brougham's Life," which will be a welcome addition to my means of knowing the time "when his ugliness had not passed its bloom."
Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Jan. 1872.