On March 26th, 1841, the first batch was sent to Addington.
“I send you a few sheets of Handbook. If your eyes will permit you to run through it, pray correct any error or make any suggestion. I have done about fifty pages (letterpress) more. The object I have is to combine learning with facetiousness, utile dulci.”
April 11, 1841.
The print is damnable, and what is worse is the enormous quantity it takes to a page. All this preliminary part, which will run to two hundred pages, is an after-thought of mine. Murray only bargained for distances and mere lionizing. It appears to me that the traveller in a Venta will thank me for an amusing bit of reading. How often have I cursed Starke[45] for the contrary, and I hope to give a true insight into Spanish manners.
May 4, 1841.
I have already expunged the bits that you objected to, and the sheets read all the better for it. I grieve deeply that the print is so execrable. But you cannot tell what a service your sound censorship is. I write currente calamo in a sort of slip-slap-and-shod style both as to matter and language. It comes boiling over like a soda-water bottle, and I cannot help it. I daresay that, if I had more time, I should make it worse, as it would be more laboured.
November 3, 1841.
I am not so bigoted a Carlist as to think all reform a wilderness. But my antiquarian, artistical and romantic predilections make me grieve at seeing barbarous destructives overturning in an hour the works of ages of taste and magnificence. This age can only destroy: witness cheap, compo churches versus cathedrals.
I am getting very slowly on. But I hope it may be done by May or June. I intend in a short preface to allude to the “state of transition” of the moment. But some things are fixed—country, ruins, battlefields, history of the past. All that can be pointed out. I am only afraid it will be too good.