It is my fate, as a
writer of history, to have before me letters never intended for my
eyes, and this has aggravated my foible, and makes me a wretched
correspondent. I should like very much to write letters gracefully
and easily, but I can't, because it is contrary to my nature." "I
have got," he writes so early as 1873, "to shrink from the use of
the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking a lame man to
walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, 'the nature of the beast.'
When others TALK to me charmingly, my answers are short, faltering,
incoherent sentences; so it is with my writing." "You," he says to
another lady correspondent, "have the pleasant faculty of easy,
pleasant letter-writing, in which I am wholly deficient."
In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, which compelled him
latterly to refuse all other literary work, gave little time for
correspondence. Its successive revisions formed his daily task
until illness struck him down. Sacks of Crimean notes, labelled
through some fantastic whim with female Christian names--the Helen
bag, the Adelaide bag, etc.--were ranged round his room.
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