Sevilla, April 3 [1833].
My wife begs me to thank you a thousand times for offering to send her box. The size is 5 inches wide, 6 inches high, 8 inches long.
If you think fit, I will send it to you, and you shall dispose of the matter as you like. It contains a few odd Spanish trinkets, about £50 worth, in which materiam superavit opus, and which she wishes not to lose on account of the recollections attached to them, being memorials of her travels. I am really quite vexed at giving you all this trouble, thinking on the subject exactly the same as you do, and wishing all ladies and their empeños at the devil.
We are full of Misereres, Custodias, Pagos, and processions, all the night and day work of the Holy Week, all unction, the fruits of which will duly make their appearance, this day nine months, in a plentiful crop of bastards for the Casa de los Expositos. Lots of English from the Rock, of the regiment called The Tiger; Consuls, Vice-Consuls, and Consuls-General, as thick as blackberries, and quite as insipid. I am dying to be lodged again in the Alhambra, and hear the ovation of the Tia’s chickens. Will the troubled times permit your Excellency to come and see us again this summer, when we will ride to Alhama and on to the Consul Mark, el siempre Vencidor, El Galib?
We are all at a nonplus at what is going on in the Corte. His Majesty’s letter to the Captain-Generals is a poser, and means in English, “I want nobody but my little Cea Bermudez.”[34] However, I am delighted to see that his Majesty is so well, as these decrees speak more clearly than any bulletins, that he has no thoughts of dying, and cares no more for Isabel than George the Fourth did for Charlotte. I wonder you can have any doubts whatever as to what will happen next. You will see the next word of command will be “As you were.”
It would be a pity that the march of intellect should get into the Peninsula, or that Africa should cease to begin at the Pyrenees.
Sevilla, Wednesday, 17 [April 1833].
I enclose you the receipt of the diligence for the small box I sent you, in consequence of your kind offer to send it home for my wife. Mind, I should never have ventured to bother you on such a subject. The diligence will arrive on Monday morning. If you will send your whiskered Chasseur with the enclosed paper, no custom-house officer will dare to open it.
I suppose Brackenbury will send you the news of the two packets, up and down, which have met at Cadiz. The one from Malta brings the news that the Russians have 7 sail of the line at Constantinople, and 40 transports full of troops in the Bosphorus, and that Mehemet Ali’s fleet, 5 sail, have hoisted the flag of independence.[35]
The Hermes from England, sent off at an hour’s notice by the Admiralty, touched at Oporto, Vigo, Lisbon, with orders to all the English ships of war to proceed directly to Constantinople, without anchoring at Gibraltar. The Malabar, Captain Percy (with Sir William Eden on board), is at Cadiz, and, ere this, in the Mediterranean. Other English ships are in sight. Private intelligence to “the Proconsul” says that the cholera is at Lisbon.