I have been re-reading the _Legend of Montrose_ and the _Heart of Midlothian_ with _such_ delight, and poems of both the Brownings, and Ruskin, and _The Woman in White_, and _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, etc., etc.!!! I have got two volumes of _The Modern Painters_ back with me to go at.
What a treat your letters are! Bits are _nearly_ as good as being there. The sunset you saw with Miss C----, and the shadowy groups of the masquers below in the increasing mists of evening, painted itself as a whole on to my brain--in the way _scenes_ of Walter Scott always did. Like the farewell to the Pretender in _Red Gauntlet_, and the black feather on the quicksand in _The Bride of Lammermuir_.
The ball must have been a grand sight, but I think, judging from the list, that your dress as Thomas the Rhymer stands out in marked _individuality_. Nothing shows more how few people are at all _original_ than the absence of any thing striking or quaint in most of the characters assumed at a Fancy Ball. This, however, is Pampering the Pride of you members of the Mutual Admiration Society. You must not become cliquish--no not Ye Yourselves!!!!
Above all _you_ must never lose that gracious quality (for which I have so often given you a prize) of patience and sympathy with small musicians and jangling pianos in the houses of kind and hospitable Philistines. Besides, I like you to be largely gracious and popular. All the same I confess that it is a grievance that music (and sherry!) are jointly regarded as necessary to be supplied by all hosts and hostesses--whether they can give you them good or not! People do not cram their bad drawings down your throats in similar fashion, Still what is, is--and Man is more than Music--and I have never felt the real mastership you hold in music more than when you have beaten a march out of some old tub for kindness' sake with a little gracious bow at the end! Don't you remember my telling you about that wisp of an organist whom Mr. R---- petted till he didn't know his shock head from his clumsy heels, and the insufferable airs he gave himself at their party over the piano, and the audience, and the lights, and silence, and what he would or would not play to the elderly merchants. And of all the amateur-and-water performances!!! I have heard enough good playing to be able to gauge him!...