LETTER XXVI.

TO MADOX BROWN, FINCHLEY.

Miss Barbara Leigh Smith became after a while Mrs. Bodichon--a name held in high and deserved honour by persons interested in the cause which she served with lifelong zeal and liberality--the advancement of women. She was also a landscape-painter of considerable gift.

[Chatham Place, London.] Wednesday [? 1854.]

Dear Brown,

Dear Lizzy is very unwell indeed, and I think on Saturday I shall probably be taking her down to Hastings, for her to stay there some time at a place that Barbara Smith, who has got quite thick with her, has recommended as cheap and nice. Barbara Smith, the Howitts, and Dr. Wilkinson, are all enraptured with the dear. I mean to show her productions to Ruskin, who was here again this morning, and who I know will worship her.

Will you come on Tuesday? or sooner and better on Friday.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This was probably Charlotte Polidori--or possibly the _Grand_-Aunt, Harriet Pierce.

[2] “Sloshy” was a term of disparagement used by the P.R.B.’s in their early days, to indicate anything lax and scamped in the processes of painting; and hence it got applied more generally to any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional cast.

[3] The name, thus written, occurs in _The Carillon_.

MADOX BROWN.

SOME LETTERS FOLLOWED BY A DIARY.

MADOX BROWN TO ELIZABETH BROWN, HASTINGS.