I Thought I Knew Brinsley

Abstract

I agree in opinion with you, my dearest Love, and am more decided in the opinion than you appear to be that I may lay the foundation of much future good by this trip to London—for long as I have known and well as I thought I knew Brinsley—I find I had still to learn the full extent of his want of those feelings that can constitute him even a friend much less a brother. I never was before convinced that no sort of reliance whatever can be placed upon him, and that all I had sacrificed in the political line would, with his hearty goodwill, have remained for ever unrewarded and unnoticed, if it in the slightest degree depended upon him, that it should be acknowledged. I therefore most prodigiously miscalculated, when I imagined, as I confess I once did imagine, that my having a brother on the spot, would in some degree do away the mischief of my absence from London, and that his constant presence, and as constant intercourse with those who in future will be all powerful, would be a sort of substitute for my own presence, remedy or obviate the injury to my interests, which my constant absence would otherwise induce. It is a point of no small importance that I have discovered my error in time, it is one of still greater, that I have had an opportunity of establishing my claims on my own account totally independent of him, and that those claims have been allowed in the quarter, where I most wished to have them allowed, and I have every reason to be assured will be considered, whether Mr Brinsley were to continue in existence or not.

Temple Bar (London), 119 (March 1900) 409–10. Editor’s title.