Elizabeth Barrett to Richard Hengist Horne, 5 February 1844: 'I [italics]cannot read[end italics] Lever, ... honestly & without affectation, I [italics]cannot[end italics] [...] Over and over again have I tried to read his book -- and every time I came to the conclusion that he was a remarkably clever writer who was unreadable by me. [...] The chapters, I have read of him, make my head ache as if I had been sitting in the next room to an orgy [...] of gentlemen topers, -- with their low gentility, & "hip hip hurrahs," & wine out of wine-coolers [...] he is contracted & conventional, & unrefined in his line of conventionality -- and I cannot believe that he represents fairly even the social & jovial side of men of much refinement'.