I even had conceived an
expression to meet you with, which was thanking you for some of the most
exquisite pieces of criticism I had ever read in my life. In particular,
I should have brought forward that on "Troilus and Cressida" and
Shakspeare, which, it is little to say, delighted me and instructed me
(if not absolutely _instructed_ me, yet put into _full-grown sense_ many
conceptions which had arisen in me before in my most discriminating
moods). All these things I was preparing to say, and bottling them up
till I came, thinking to please my friend and host the author, when lo!
this deadly blight intervened.
I certainly ought to make great allowances for your misunderstanding me.
You, by long habits of composition and a greater command gained over
your own powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in
which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a
common letter into sane prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an
engagement will act upon me to torment; _e.g._, when I have undertaken,
as three or four times I have, a school-boy copy of verses for Merchant
Taylors' boys, at a guinea a copy, I have fretted over them in perfect
inability to do them, and have made my sister wretched with my
wretchedness for a week together. The same, till by habit I have
acquired a mechanical command, I have felt in making paragraphs.
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