an official friend and repulsed all attempts at explanation, till a letter written when Ward was seventy-two and his correspondent turned of seventy produced a reconciliation rather dry on his part. It would have been satisfactory to know that some relenting, some interest beyond a "suspicion" of the writer, had been shown on the receipt of the following manly letter, written after the publication of _De Vere_. After alluding to the internal traits by which he had identified the author, the anonymous correspondent continues: "It surprises me, I confess, that the feeling, judgment, and sagacity, which sufficed to produce the work that I have been commending, should have suffered the golden opinions of me, which you entertained, to be filched and adulterated by mere traducers, whose reports the hearer's own experience could have almost refuted, and whose testimony was so obviously liable to be warped by prejudice. "We live in a strange world. Before my feelings and dispositions had changed from wavering and transient to permanent and fixed,--before the desultory ramblings, which almost became our age, had terminated in a path, and that, I trust, a right and honorable one, and from which, with moderate allowance for human inferiority, I have not deviated since,--before my principles had attained their vigor, and generated those correct habits which it was their province to produce,--in short, while, like most young men, I might be said to have as yet 'no character at all,' I obtained your friendship. How I lost it, I have already told you. When, remains to tell you. I lost it when any fruits which my youth may have promised had appeared; lost it all at once, under circumstances scarcely more annoying to my feelings than revolting to my sense of what was right and just. "I am not seeking to penetrate what is to me, indeed, no secret; neither do I form the unavailing wish that our expired intercourse should revive. C'en est fait. A knot which has been loosened or untied may be formed again, but this knot has been cut. Accordingly, I neither address you by your name nor subscribe my own. My hand-writing, though not disguised, is, like yourself, much changed; and, though this were not the case, you could not, after the lapse of so much time, have recognized it.