Miss Beale replied to this by sending her paper on ‘Lear,’ to which came this response:— ‘_March 22, 1887._ ‘I am entirely glad to hear of the Oxford plan, which seems faultless, and am most happy to get the King Lear, though I hope you have never learned as much of human life as to be able to read him as you can Britomart. What I want to know is whether Cordelia was ever so little in love—with _any_ body, except her Father.’ Two days later came the following:— ‘_March 24, 1887._ ‘I have been reading your Lear with very great interest. It is one of the subtlest and truest pieces of Shakespeare criticism I ever saw, but just as I guessed—misses the key note. You never enter on the question what it is that drives Lear mad! And throughout you fall into the fault which women nearly always commit if they don’t err on the other side,—of always talking of love as if it had nothing to do with sex.... I am extremely glad to note your interest in and knowledge of music.—Ever faithfully and respectfully yours, J. RUSKIN.’ After this letter there was a pause in a correspondence which had been kept up pretty briskly on various subjects. In June, however, Miss Beale wrote again,—the purport of her letter may be gathered from the answer. ‘_June 8, 1887._ ‘I never have been ill this year; the reports you heard or saw in papers were variously malicious or interested. But I have been busy, in very painful or sorrowful business—at Oxford or at home—nor even in the usual tenor of spring occupation could I have answered rightly the different questions you sent me. Especially, I could not tell you anything of your paper on Lear, because I think women should never write on Shakespeare, or Homer, or Æschylus, or Dante, or any of the greater powers in literature. Spenser, or Chaucer, or Molière, or any of the second and third order of classics—but not the leaders. And you really had missed much more in Lear than I should like to tell you. ‘I really thought I had given the College my books—but if I haven’t, I won’t—not even if you set the Librarian to ask me; for it does seem to me such a shame that a girl can always give her dentist a guinea for an hour’s work, and her physician for an opinion; and she can’t give me one for what has cost me half my life to learn, and will help her till the end of hers to know. ‘Please go on with your book exactly as you like to have it. I have neither mind nor time for reading just now.—Ever most truly yrs., J. RUSKIN.’