Unless Sebastopol gets taken before long, it will, I think, upset the present ministry, and perhaps the present aristocracy along with them; and Laing, Layard, and Lowe, if they can provide themselves with a sufficient Co., may come in as the new parliamentary firm. The war, which the great people, lords and statesmen, thought would be unpopular in a few months, is more likely, I think, to become a popular question versus lords and statesmen. There is no murmuring at the new taxes, but a great deal at the old politicians.
Here is an authentic anecdote from Vienna. The French and English Plenipotentaries urged how natural the arrangement would be that the Euxine should, like the American lakes, be common to both nations; to which Prince Gortschakoff answered that he should not object to that, were there only a Niagara at the Dardanelles.
To C. E. Norton, Esq.
London: September 14, 1855.
So we have at last taken the besieged city. We here took it very unconcernedly, when the great news gradually oozed out and then spread abroad, on Monday evening last. It is, however, an immense relief, privately as well as publicly, and I do not doubt is felt as such. I confess to my own feeling that Russia should be let off easily. What other power can bring North Asia into discipline? I could be thankful to see her hold some port or have some means of exit to the Atlantic, now that she has learnt that the maritime powers are strong enough to check her encroachments when they please.
To Professor F. J. Child.
London: October 29, 1855.
I have been astonished and delighted at once to see Shady Hill reposing itself in St. James’s Street. I had hardly faith, I confess, to expect the removal of that mountain to this side of our common sea.
I congratulate you on having achieved Spenser. I hope I shall see the work. Let me confess to having never yet read one quarter of the ‘Faery Queen.’ But you are a much more literary nation that we. Few people, I fear, will return in England to the study of Plutarch’s Lives, and in working to the end of that attempt I can only look forward to the readers of America. I hope it will be pretty tolerably readable and correct when it does at last present itself. Certainly, if I had tried to translate it myself, it would have had a more Greek tone; but I don’t think we any of us write so idiomatically now as my friends of Charles II.’s time.
You see that we, that is our newspapers, after considerable bluster, mean decidedly to back out of any quarrelling with you. The ‘Times,’ I think, decidedly feels that it took a wrong step, and is walking out of its front position with all possible celerity.