Note 267 — Chapter XIV

The opening of this letter (25th of August 1859), referring to a conviction for murder, afterwards reversed by a Home Office pardon against the continued and steadily expressed opinion of the judge who tried the case, is much too characteristic of the writer to be lost. "I cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of our brave and excellent friend. . . . I have often had more than half a mind to write and thank that upright judge. I declare to heaven that I believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and courage can render to society. . . . Of course I have been driving the girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man—because a merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson.