The 19th draws nigh. If any of the Club are with you and Mrs. Bryant in coming up, do not any of you be so deluded as to listen to any invitation to dine at Kent, but come right along, hollow and merry, and--I don't say I promise you a dinner, but what will suffice for natzir, anyhow. Art, to be sure, is out of the question, as it is when I subscribe myself, and ourselves, to you and Mrs. Bryant, with affectionate regard, Yours truly, ORVILLE DEWEY. To Rev. William Ware. SHEFFIELD, Oct. 13, 1850. "THAT'S what I will," I said, as I took up your letter just now, to read it again, thinking you had desired me to write immediately. "How affectionate!" thinks I to myself; "that must have been a good letter that I wrote him last; I really think some of my letters must be pretty good ones, after all; I hate conceit,--I really believe my tendency is the other way,-but, hang it! who knows but I may turn out, upon myself, a fine letter after all? But at any rate Ware loves me, does n't he? He wants me to write a few lines, at least, very soon. It's evident he would be pleased to have me, pleased as the Laird of Ellangowan said of the king's commission,--good honest gentle-[220] man, he can't be more pleased than I am!" But oh! the slips of those who are shodden with vanity! I read on, thinking it was a nice letter of yours,--feeling something startled, to be sure, at the compellation, as if you were mesmerise, and had got an insight (calls me bambino half of the time)--looking at your mood reverential as a droll jest,--vexed at first, but then reconciled, about the book and the lecturing,--charmed and grateful beyond measure at what you say about your health,--when! at last!! I fell upon your request: "Now give me one brief epistle between this and our seeing you."!!! BETWEEN! what a word! what a hiatus! what a gulf! Down into it tumbled pride, vanity, pleasure, everything. Well, great occasions call out virtue. As I emerged, as I came up, I came up a hero; the vanities of this world were all struck off from me in my fall, and I came up a hero; for I determined I would write to you immediately. There! beat that if you can! I give you a chance,-one chance,--I don't ask YOU to write at all. What is it you call my study now-a-days,--"terrible moral metaphysics "? You may well say "weighed down" with them. I was never in my life before quite so modest as I am now. Not that I have n't enough to say, and all my faculties leap to the task; but all the while there looms up before me an ideal of what such a course of lectures might be, that I fear I shall never reach up to, no, nor one twentieth part of the way to it. . . . [221]To Mrs. David Lane. SHEFFIELD, Jan. 25, 1851. MY DEAR FRIEND,--You won't come, and I will write to you! See the difference. See how I return good for evil!