MY DEAR HENLEY,—. . . Last night we had a dinner-party, consisting of the John Addington, curry, onions (lovely onions), and beefsteak. So unusual is any excitement, that F. and I feel this morning as if we had been to a coronation. However I must, I suppose, write.
I was sorry about your female contributor squabble. ’Tis very comic, but really unpleasant. But what care I? Now that I illustrate my own books, I can always offer you a situation in our house—S. L. Osbourne and Co. As an author gets a halfpenny a copy of verses, and an artist a penny a cut, perhaps a proof-reader might get several pounds a year.
O that Coronation! What a shouting crowd there was! I obviously got a firework in each eye. The king looked very magnificent, to be sure; and that great hall where we feasted on seven hundred delicate foods, and drank fifty royal wines—quel coup d’œil! but was it not over-done, even for a coronation—almost a vulgar luxury? And eleven is certainly too late to begin dinner. (It was really 6.30 instead of 5.30.)
Your list of books that Cassells have refused in these weeks is not quite complete; they also refused:—
1. Six undiscovered Tragedies, one romantic Comedy, a fragment of Journal extending over six years, and an unfinished Autobiography reaching up to the first performance of King John. By William Shakespeare.
2. The journals and Private Correspondence of David, King of Israel.
3. Poetical Works of Arthur, Iron Dook of Wellington, including a Monody on Napoleon.
4. Eight books of an unfinished novel, Solomon Crabb. By Henry Fielding.
5. Stevenson’s Moral Emblems.
You also neglected to mention, as per contra, that they had during the same time accepted and triumphantly published Brown’s Handbook to Cricket, Jones’s First French Reader, and Robinson’s Picturesque Cheshire, uniform with the same author’s Stately Homes of Salop.