SD767.1. John Stuart Mill to William Tait

Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 3.

India House

6th August 1833

My dear Sir

You must have been a good deal surprised at hearing nothing from me respecting the literary article which was to be transferred from the Examiner to your Magazine. The fact is that for some weeks past the pressure of other occupations had left me no time to take the article in hand and fit it for your use: and now at length when I had begun to rewrite it for you, I find that the work it is a review of (a poem named Pauline) has been disposed of in your last number by a passing notice, in terms of contempt which though I think the poem was overpraised in the Monthly Repository, I cannot consider it to deserve. So I hope you will receive this as my apology for not fulfilling my engagement.

Believe me

Most truly yours

J. S. Mill

Publication: John Stuart Mill, Collected Works, Vol. 12, ed. Francis E. Mineka (Toronto, 1963), p. 174.

Manuscript: National Library of Scotland.

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