The 'Master' is somebody you don't know, W. J. Fox, a magnificent and poetical nature, who used to write in reviews when I was a boy, and to whom my verses, a bookful, written at the ripe age of twelve and thirteen, were shown: which verses he praised not a little; which praise comforted me not a little. Then I lost sight of him for years and years; then I published _anonymously_ a little poem--which he, to my inexpressible delight, praised and expounded in a gallant article in a magazine of which he was the editor; then I found him out again; he got a publisher for 'Paracelsus' (I read it to him in manuscript) and is in short 'my literary father'. Pretty nearly the same thing did he for Miss Martineau, as she has said somewhere. God knows I forget what the 'talk', table-talk was about--I think she must have told you the results of the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at Ascot, and that day's, the dinner-day's morning at Elstree and St. Albans. She is to give me advice about my worldly concerns, and not before I need it! I cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me--do go on, and tell me all sorts of things, 'the story' for a beginning; but your moralisings on 'your age' and the rest, are--now what _are_ they? not to be reasoned on, disputed, laughed at, grieved about: they are 'Fanny's crotchets'. I thank thee, Jew (lia), for teaching me that word. I don't know that I shall leave town for a month: my friend Monclar looks piteous when I talk of such an event. I can't bear to leave him; he is to take my portrait to-day (a famous one he _has_ taken!) and very like he engages it shall be. I am going to town for the purpose. . . . Now, then, do something for me, and see if I'll ask Miss M----to help you! I am going to begin the finishing 'Sordello'--and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on 'Strafford') and I want to have _another_ tragedy in prospect, I write best so provided: I had chosen a splendid subject for it, when I learned that a magazine for next, this, month, will have a scene founded on my story; vulgarizing or doing no good to it: and I accordingly throw it up. I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love, to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time. I have many half-conceptions, floating fancies: give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting; should it be a woman who loves thus, or a man? What circumstances will best draw out, set forth this feeling? . . . The tragedies in question were to be 'King Victor and King Charles', and 'The Return of the Druses'.