or a Whittington of old, stately House of Merchants; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one half the year supplied the place of the sun’s light; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell!  In thee remain, and not in the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my “works!” There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful!  My mantle I bequeath among ye.

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communication.  At that period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had not reached it.  I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only.  Something of the first flutter was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light.  I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel.  I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned upon the world.  I am now as if I had never been other than my own master.  It is natural to me to go where I please, to do what I please.  I find myself at eleven o’clock in the day in Bond-street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour for years past.  I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall.  Methinks I have been thirty years a collector.  There is nothing strange nor new in it.  I find myself before a fine picture in a morning.  Was it ever otherwise?  What is become of Fish-street Hill?  Where is Fenchurch-street?  Stones of old Mincing-lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal?  I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall.  It is Change time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles.  It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the change in my condition to a passing into another world.  Time stands still in a manner to me.  I have lost all distinction of season.  I do not know the day of the week, or of the month.  Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday.  I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.  The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, &c.  The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations.  What charm has washed that Ethiop white?  What is gone of Black Monday?  All days are the same.  Sunday itself—­that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it—­is melted down into a week day.  I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holyday.  I have Time for