I am very sorry that I did not answer your letter immediately as I fully intended to. And I have meant to every day since. Not that I have anything of consequence to say. You acted with courage & I don’t doubt rightly, i.e. conscientiously. You do not give me the slightest clue to the reason or process of the sudden conviction. Probably you could not. Instinctive or unexplainable convictions generally have greater weight, & rightly so, than deliberate conclusions of judgment in determining a good hearted person’s action in love. Yet] have felt very sad to see the love of such a man as Bartholomew repulsed, partly from sympathy with him, no doubt, but also from general apprehensions which I suppose are foolish. But the fact is I feel that Bartholomew is one of the very few men I have ever known both in woman’s society & out of it, who do not attempt to be and can not be imposters. Most men do their courting, instinctively it seems, by a steady imposition. Bartholomew is the same to men that he is to women; he has no capacity to hide his faults or deficiencies & never attempts it. They stick out, but his virtues are other men’s manners & are

Edward Sheffield Bartholomew

[380]

As I said I don ’t think it necessary that we should know the reasons of a conviction to act upon it—it is the state of mind (heart) that settles the question. But then it troubles me that the state of mind or conviction on which you acted decisively was but one day old, while as you say your instinct or unreflective “dreams” (state of mind) had all been for weeks previously of an opposite character. You had received no new light, no new fact, no closer observation, no experience of incompatibility of character had occurred; it must have been a sudden reflection or a mere wave of the impulse, a wave of reaction which invariably follows a new state of the mind, under which you acted.

I have been much troubled by reflections of this sort—added to the deepest sympathy which I have for Bartholomew—which I would have for any man under similar circumstances, but peculiarly for one of his character. However, though I don’t know you very well, I have more confidence in your good sense than I would have in most girls’. You have some deficiencies of constitution & are badly diseased in one faculty, but I don’t see that these difficulties could have operated in the present case; so finally I bring myself to believe that it is most probable you have, by whatever process, done what was best, what was most judicious under the circumstances. It is only another case of unfortunate attachment, for which you are in no way responsible. It happens every day. God knows why. It is the most melancholy thing in the world.

I came from London to Birmingham a week ago, staid with Field over Sunday & Monday, & Tuesday to Edinbro’. Three days of business moderately successful there & then here. I return to Edinbro’ tomorrow & to London Tuesday or Wednesday (17th—18th). Sad place this Glasgow, more vice & poverty; crape hat bands; long, severe faces, white cravats & black coats, rags, squalor, drunkenness & riot than I ever saw elsewhere. It is worse than Rome or Naples on the outside. Bad faces & bad manners. They raise good people here at great expense.