Ever believe me, your affectionate
E.B. BARRETT.


_To H.S. Boyd_
Sidmouth: Friday [1834].

My dear Friend,--I don't know how I shall begin to persuade you not to
be angry with me, but perhaps the best plan will be to confess as many
sins as would cover this sheet of paper, and then to go on with my
merits. Certainly I am altogether guiltless of your charge of not
noticing your book's arrival because no Calvinism arrived with it.
I told you the bare truth when I told you _why_ I did not write
immediately. The passage relating to Calvinism I certainly read,
and as certainly was sorry for; but as certainly as both those
certainties, such reading and such regret had nothing whatever to do
with the silence which made you so angry with me.

The other particular thing of which I should have written is Mr.
Parker and my letters. I am more and, more sorry that you should have
sent them to him at all--not that their loss is any loss to anybody,
but that I scarcely like the idea--indeed, I don't like it at all--of
their remaining, worthless as they are, at Mr. P.'s mercy. As for
my writing about them, I should not be able to make up my mind to
do _that_. You know I had nothing to do with their being sent to Mr.
Parker, and was indeed in complete ignorance of it. Besides, I should
be half ashamed to write to him now on any subject. A very long
interregnum took place in our correspondence, which was his own work;
and when he wrote to me the summer before last, I delayed from week
to week, and then from month to month, answering it. And now I feel