Here there are stories afloat of the most scandalous nature possible to imagine....
This is all highly edifying, and gives rise to fear that the end of the world is at hand. Buy yourself some green stockings at Salzburg or at Innsbruck, if you find any that fit you. Bavarian legs are as big as my body.
Good-bye, dear friend. Take good care of yourself and enjoy yourself. Do not forget to let me hear from you.
CCLXXXII
London, British Museum, August 23, 1865.
Dear Friend: After awaiting your letter a long time, in Paris, it finally arrived, written while you were in the heart of the Tyrol. I have been here for about six weeks. I was here during the concluding days of the season. I went to some terrible dinners, and two or three of the last balls.
It seems to me that lord Palmerston has aged perceptibly, notwithstanding his success at the elections, and I feel that it is more than doubtful whether he will be in any condition to engage in the next campaign. At his retirement, there will be, doubtless, a fine crisis.
I have just spent three days at the home of his probable successor, Mr. Gladstone, who did not amuse me, but who interested me, for it is always a pleasure for me to observe the varieties of human nature. Here they are so unlike ours, that it is inexplicable how, in a ten hours’ journey, one finds the featherless bipeds to be so utterly different from those in Paris.
Mr. Gladstone seemed to me to be in some respects a man of genius, in others a child. In him are the elements of the child, the statesman, and the lunatic. Staying at his house were five or six curates or deans, and every morning the guests of the castle were entertained with a short prayer in common. I was not present on a Sunday, which must be something extraordinary.
What seemed to me preferable to all the rest was a sort of badly baked roll which is removed from the oven at breakfast-time, and which one finds it difficult to digest during the rest of the day. Besides this there is the hard civrn, that is the ale of Wales, which is celebrated.