_To C. E. Norton_. WOODBRIDGE. _May_ 18/79. MY DEAR NORTON, It is over six months, I believe, since we exchanged a letter; mine the last shot: which I mention only because that has been my reason for not writing again till I should hear from you that all was well enough with you and yours to justify my writing an idle letter. You have spoken of an aged Mother:--if your Winter has been such as ours! And not over yet, as scarce a leaf on the trees, and a N. E. wind blowing Cold, Cough, Bronchitis, etc., and the confounded Bell of a neighbouring Church announcing a Death, day after day. I certainly never remember so long, and so mortal a Winter: among young as well as old. Among the latter, I have just lost my elder, and only surviving Brother. But I shall close this Bill of Mortality before turning over the leaf. Well: it is Mr. Clarke's pamphlet which has encouraged me to 'take up the pen,' for I think it was you who sent it to me. All I am qualified to say about it is, that it is very well and earnestly written; but on a Subject, like your own Olympia, that I am no Judge of. I think of forwarding it to Cowell at our Cambridge, who is a Judge of Everything, I think, while pretending to Nothing. . . . This reminds me of all the pains he bestowed on me five and twenty years ago; of which the result is one final Edition of Omar and Jami. . . . Omar remains as he was; Jami (Salaman) is cut down to two-thirds of his former proportion, and very much improved, I think. It is still in a wrong key: Verse of Miltonic strain, unlike the simple Eastern; I remember trying that at first, but could not succeed. So there is little but the Allegory itself (not a bad one), and now condensed into a very fair Bird's Eye view; quite enough for any Allegory, I think. . . . And--(this Letter is to be all about myself)--by this post I send you my Handbook of Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, of which I am so doubtful that I do not yet care to publish it. I wished to draw a few readers to a Book which nobody reads, by an Abstract of the most readable Parts connected with as little of my Prose as would tell the story of much prosaic Verse, but that very amount of prosy Verse may help to soak the story into the mind (as Richardson, etc.) in a way that my more readable Abstract does not. So it may only serve to remind any one of a Book--which he never read! The Original must be more obsolete in America than here in England; however, I should like to know what you make of it: and you see that you may tell me very plainly, for it is not as an Author, but only as Author's Showman that I appear.