"'Whitby! Whitby! funny eye! funny eye! two dozen, and let you off easy. Oh you ——!'
"Now, if Madame de B. has a parrot, it had better be taught a French parody of the same sounds.
"With regard to our purposed Journal, I will call it what you please, but it should be a newspaper, to make it pay. We can call it 'The Harp,' if you like—or any thing.
"I feel exactly as you do about our 'art[27],'but it comes over me in a kind of rage every now and then, like * * * *, and then, if I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing, which you describe in your friend, I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
"I wish you to think seriously of the Journal scheme—for I am as serious as one can be, in this world, about any thing. As to matters here, they are high and mighty—but not for paper. It is much about the state of things betwixt Cain and Abel. There is, in fact, no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them. Excepting a few occasional murders, (every body killing whomsoever he pleases, and being killed, in turn, by a friend, or relative, of the defunct,) there is as quiet a society and as merry a Carnival as can be met with in a tour through Europe. There is nothing like habit in these things.
"I shall remain here till May or June, and, unless 'honour comes unlocked for,' we may perhaps meet, in France or England, within the year.
"Yours, &c.
"Of course, I cannot explain to you existing circumstances, as they open all letters.