In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point. This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818, given in Lord Houghton’s _Life, Letters, &c._,[2] and commencing at page 227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage: “The Misses —— are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me much, and in this way:—now I am coming the Richardson!—On my return, the first day I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. —— to take asylum in her house. She is an East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir. At the time I called, Mrs. —— was in conference with her up stairs, and the young ladies were warm in her praise down stairs, calling her genteel, interesting, and a thousand other pretty things, to which I gave no heed, not being partial to nine days’ wonders. Now all is completely changed: they hate her, and, from what I hear, she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others, which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that _nothing particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times, too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will, by this time, think I am in love with her, so, before I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose life is to me a banquet. I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no _sensations_: what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have, by this, had much talk with her—no such thing; there are the Misses —— on the look out. They think I don’t admire her because I don’t stare at her; they call her a flirt to me—what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic