Letter to Frederic Harrison, 27th April, 1866.
A thousand thanks for your note. Do not worry yourself so much about those two questions that you will be forced to hate me. On Tuesday next we are to go to Dorking for probably a fortnight. I wished you to read the first hundred pages of my third volume; but I fear now that I must be content to wait and send you a duplicate proof of a chapter or two that are likely to make a lawyer shudder by their poetic license. Please to be in great distress sometime for want of my advice, and tease me considerably to get it, that I may prove my grateful memory of these days.
Letter to John Blackwood, 30th April, 1866.
To-morrow we go—Mr. Lewes's bad health driving us—to Dorking, where everything will reach me as quickly as in London.
I am in a horrible fidget about certain points which I want to be sure of in correcting my proofs. They are chiefly two questions. I wish to know,
1. Whether, in Napoleon's war with England, after the breaking-up of the Treaty of Amiens, the seizure and imprisonment of civilians was exceptional, or whether it was continued throughout the war?
2. Whether, in 1833, in the case of transportation to one of the colonies, when the sentence did not involve hard labor, the sentenced person might be at large on his arrival in the colony?
It is possible you may have some one near at hand who will answer these questions. I am sure you will help me if you can, and will sympathize in my anxiety not to have even an allusion that involves practical impossibilities.
One can never be perfectly accurate, even with one's best effort, but the effort must be made.
Journal, 1866.