“The most enduring tastes a man can cultivate (avarice apart) are, I believe, the love of scenery and music. There I feel stronger than ever: the former has, perhaps from living a good deal alone, become a passion with me, and I am better pleased to have glens, glaciers, and cataracts than the fascinations of soirees and receptions.
“Keep ‘Horace Templeton’ quite en cachet, for though I suppose I shall be known easily, I will not confess, but die innocent.
“We have very grave events happening here at Milan, but they are kept quiet by the police, and even in society every one you ask on the subject says—Non e niente: and so they will keep on saying till the streets are barricaded, and the city in open revolt. Between ourselves, the reform party here are great blackguards, and the Pope [? without irreverence] an ass to think that moderate concessions and reasonable privileges will content a mob, who only look for a new constitution as an occasion for general pillage. It’s all very fine for ‘the gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease,’ to say God-speed to the march of Liberal opinions in other lands; but let them remember that our own institutions took centuries to grow and to consolidate, and were often shaken and menaced, and only at length firmly established by the force of public opinion, which finds its exponent in aristocratic institutions,—a hereditary peerage and a popular assembly, nearly four-fifths of which is aristocratic. Try the same systems in other countries, and see what will come of it. Get people to make laws who never met for the voting of a parish cess or a penny poor rate; liberate a press that only asks freedom that it may revel in libel; set up an aristocracy that are uneducated and unreformed as objects of general respect! No, no! If the Pope had contented himself with his first [? effort], and swept the Church and its monastic institutions free from abuses; had he examined into the state of charities and hospitals and schools,—he would have done far more good, though far less obtrusively, than by quarrelling with Austria, and fraternising with Mazzini & Co.
“There are rumours of an outbreak at Bologna; probably, my dear friend, you have already sighed forth a wish that I was in the midst of it rather than [that I should] inflict upon you this tiresome piece of prolixity. But remember what the old woman said to the sentinel, who threatened to put the bayonet into her hinder part—‘Divil thank you—sure it’s yer thrade!’
“Fore God! I think a Bull from the Pope must be easy to obtain in comparison with the formality of this unlucky document. I now enclose it en règle.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Villa Lima, Lago de Como, Oct. 6, 1847.
“You say you are puzzled by what Chapman says as to my being charged with the production (at least one-half cost) of unsold copies. Yet the fact is precisely so. There were of ‘Hinton’ something above 16,000 sold and somewhere like 20,000 printed, and with the interval between the two amounts you will find that I am charged with a moiety of the cost of producing. It was this fact, coupled with the trickery of a depreciatory sale, that made Chapman pronounce the whole [? transaction] a cheat.*
* What Edward Chapman had actually written (some time
previously) was: “You have been in the hands of the
Philistines. It is these things which bring discredit on our
craft, and make authors look upon us as a set of ghouls
ready to eat them, body and bones—with a tendency to get
fat upon their brains. No doubt it was thought that you
would make a nice dish curried.”—E. D.
“It was Chapman’s accountant who discovered M’Glashan’s status, [which] is indeed the greatest mystery of all. How he could leave the concern so deeply indebted I cannot conceive. Great sacrifices, I am sure, he made to retain the Magazine, but the sum of £3000 must be six times more than would purchase the D. U. M.