I. I have kept the following kind and helpful letter for the close of the year:— “January 8, 1874. “Sir,—I have been much moved by a passage in No. 37 of Fors Clavigera, in which you express yourself in somewhat desponding terms as to your loneliness in ‘life and thought,’ now you have grown old. You complain that many of your early friends have forgotten or disregarded you, and that you are almost left alone. I cannot certainly be called an early friend, or, in the common meaning of the word, a friend of any time. But I cannot refrain from telling you that there are ‘more than 7,000’ in this very ‘Christ-defying’ England whom you have made your friends by your wise sympathy and faithful teaching. I, for my own part, owe you a debt of thankfulness not only for the pleasant hours I have spent with you in your books, but also for the clearer views of many of the ills which at present press upon us, and for the methods of cure upon which you so urgently and earnestly insist. I would especially mention ‘Unto this Last’ as having afforded me the highest satisfaction. It has ever since I first read it been my text-book of political economy. I think it is one of the needfullest lessons for a selfish, recklessly competitive, cheapest-buying and dearest-selling age, that it should be told there are principles deeper, higher, and even more prudent than those by which it is just now governed. It is particularly refreshing to find Christ’s truths applied to modern commercial immorality in the trenchant and convincing style which characterizes your much maligned but most valuable book. It has been, let me assure you, appreciated in very unexpected quarters; and one humble person to whom I lent my copy, being too poor to buy one for himself actually wrote it out word for word, that he might always have it by him.” (“What a shame!” thinks the enlightened Mudie-subscriber. “See what comes of his refusing to sell his books cheap.” Yes,—see what comes of it. The dreadful calamity, to another person, of doing once, what I did myself twice—and, in great part of the book, three times. A vain author, indeed, thinks nothing of the trouble of writing his own books. But I had infinitely rather write somebody’s else’s. My good poor disciple, at the most, had not half the pain his master had; learnt his book rightly, and gave me more help, by this best kind of laborious sympathy, than twenty score of flattering friends who tell me what a fine word-painter I am, and don’t take the pains to understand so much as half a sentence in a volume.)