I enclose letter from Deutsch lunatic to go before Council and be answered by Foreign Secretary.
Highcroft House, Milford, Godalming, August 29, 1884.
Dearly Beloved,
I enclose the proofs, having mustered up volition enough to go over them at once. I think the alterations will be great improvements. I see you interpret yourself about the movements of the larynx.
As to the histology, I shall have a shot at it, but if I do not send you manuscript in a week's time, go ahead. I am perplexed about the illustrations, but I see nothing for it but to have new ones in all the cases which you have marked. Have you anybody in Cambridge who can draw the things from preparations?
You are like Trochu with your "plan," and I am anxious to learn it. But have you reflected, 1st, that I am getting deafer and deafer, and that I cannot hear what is said at the council table and in the Society's rooms half the time people are speaking? and 2nd, that so long as I am President, so long must I be at the beck and call of everything that turns up in relation to the interests of science. So long as I am in the chair, I cannot be a faineant or refuse to do anything and everything incidental to the position.
My notion is to get away for six months, so as to break with the "world, the flesh, and the devil" of London, for all which I have conceived a perfect loathing. Six months is long enough for anybody to be forgotten twice over by everybody but personal friends.
I am contemplating a winter in Italy, but I shall keep on my house for Harry's sake and as a pied a terre in London, and in the summer come and look at you at Burlington House, as the old soap-boiler used to visit the factory. I shall feel like the man out of whom the legion of devils departed when he looked at the gambades of the two thousand pigs going at express speed for the waters of Tiberias.
By the way, did you ever read that preposterous and immoral story carefully? It is one of the best attested of the miracles…
When I have retired from the chair (which I must not scandalise) I shall write a lay sermon on the text. It will be impressive.