November 4, 1861.
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I enclose proof of 'Pugin.'** Just one word in reference to your note about his being sent to Bedlam. He was actually sent, as pauper lunatics are, by what extraordinary chance or device of Satan nobody knows. Ferrey in the Life admits without apparently being in the least able to explain the fact; and all the little world which knew Pugin is entirely aware of it. He was removed only when a commotion was made about it in the papers, and Lord John Russell wrote to the 'Times' offering 10 pounds to a subscription in his favour, and nobody has ever attempted to explain the mystery.
May I get Ruskin's late volumes of 'Modern Painters' from Mr Langford? I have got the 'Life of Turner,' but I believe the last of these volumes is much occupied with that strange, shabby divinity. I suppose it does not much matter in choosing a god what sort of creature it is you choose, as persistent worship seems always to gain a certain amount of credit for the object of it.
I heard something about your friend George Eliot the other day from my friend Mrs Carlyle (wife of that great Tom whom you have set your heart so entirely against). Her opinion, I am sure, will amuse you. She says "Mrs Lewes" has mistaken her role--that nature intended her to be the properest of women, and that her present equivocal position is the most extraordinary blunder and contradiction possible.
I am rather anxious at present about my youngest little boy, who has hurt the bone of his arm by a fall, and is quite crippled by it.
* Eventually published with The Chronicles of Carlingford : The Perpetual Curate (1864 Blackwood) - 3 vols.
** Mrs. Oliphant reviewed, at her request, Benjamin Ferrey's Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin, and his father, Augustus Pugin; with notices of their works (London: Edward Stanford, 1861) for Blackwood's Magazine.
-from The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant / arranged and edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899) pp. 155-57.
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