I shall not be a little anxious to have your opinion of my third number. Lord Lonsdale blames me for excluding party politics and the events of the day from my plan. I exclude both the one and the other, only as far as they are merely _party_, _i. e._ personal and temporal interests, or merely events of To-day, that are defunct in the To-morrow. I flatter myself that I have been the first, who will have given a calm, disinterested account of our Constitution as it really _is_ and _how_ it is so, and that I have, more radically than has been done before, shown the unstable and boggy grounds on which all systematic reformers hitherto have stood. But be assured that I shall give up this opinion with joy, and consider a truer view of the question a more than recompense for the necessity of retracting what I have written.
God bless you! Do, pray, let me hear from you, though only three lines.
MY DEAR POOLE,--I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives _in person_, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite _beauty_ with _sufficient_ grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.
All the defects you have mentioned I am perfectly aware of, and am anxiously endeavouring to avoid. There is too often an _entortillage_ in the sentences and even in the thought (which nothing can justify), and, always almost, a stately piling up of _story_ on _story_ in one architectural period, which is not suited to a periodical essay or to essays at all (Lord Bacon, whose style mine more nearly resembles than any other, in his greater works, thought Seneca a better model for his Essays), but least of all suited to the present illogical age, which has, in imitation of the French, rejected all the _cements_ of language, so that a popular book is now a mere bag of marbles, that is, aphorisms and epigrams on one subject. But be assured that the numbers will improve; indeed, I hope that if the dire stoppage have not prevented it, you will have seen proof of improvement already in the seventh and eighth numbers,--still more in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth numbers. Strange! but the "Three Graves" is the _only_ thing I have yet heard generally praised and inquired after!! Remember how many different guests I have at my Round Table. I groan beneath the _Errata_, but I am thirty miles cross-post from my printer and publisher, and Southey, who has been my corrector, has been strangely oscitant, or, which I believe is sometimes the case, has not understood the sentences, and thought they might have a meaning for _me_ though they had not for him. There was one direful one,[60] No. 5, p. 80, lines 3 and 4. Read,--"its _functions_ being to take up the passive affections of the senses into distinct _thoughts_ and _judgements_, according to its own essential _forms_, formæ formantes in the language of Lord Bacon in contradistinction to the formæ formatæ."