His letters were reflections of himself,—­full of thought, fancy, and pleasant humor, as well as of affectionateness and true feeling.  Their character is hardly to be given in extracts, but a few passages may serve to illustrate some of these qualities.

“Ambrose Philips, the Roman Catholic, who set up the new St. Bernard Monastery at Charnwood Forest, has taken to spirit-rappings.  He avers, inter alia, that a Buddhist spirit in misery held communication with him through the table, and entreated his confessor, Father Lorraine, to say three masses for him.  Pray, convey this to T——­ for his warning.  For, moreover, it remains uncertain whether Father Lorraine did say the masses; so that perhaps T——­’s deceased co-religionist is still in the wrong place.”

Some time after his return, he wrote,—­“Really, I may say I am only just beginning to recover my spirits after returning from the young and hopeful and humane republic, to this cruel, unbelieving, inveterate old monarchy.  There are deeper waters of ancient knowledge and experience about one here, and one is saved from the temptation of flying off into space; but I think you have, beyond all question, the happiest country going.  Still, the political talk of America, as one hears it here, is not always true to the best intentions of the country, is it?”

Writing on a July day from his office in Whitehall, he says, after speaking of the heat of the weather,—­“Time has often been compared to a river:  if the Thames at London represent the stream of traditional wisdom, the comparison will indeed be of an ill odor; the accumulated wisdom of the past will be proved upon analogy to be as it were the collected sewage of the centuries; and the great problem, how to get rid of it.”

In March, 1854, he wrote,—­“People talk a good deal about that book of Whewell’s on the Plurality of Worlds.  I recommend Fields to pirate it.  Have you seen it?  It is to show that Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, etc., are all pretty certainly uninhabitable,—­being (Jupiter, Saturn, etc., to wit) strange washy limbos of places, where at the best only mollusks (or, in the case of Venus, salamanders) could exist.  Hence we conclude we are the only rational creatures, which is highly satisfactory, and, what is more, quite Scriptural.  Owen, on the other hand, I believe, and other scientific people, declare it a most presumptuous essay,—­ conclusions audacious, and reasoning fallacious, though the facts are allowed; and in that opinion I, on the ground that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the inductive philosophy, incline to concur.”

Of his work he wrote,—­“Well, I go on in the office, operose nihil agenda, very operose, and very nihil too.  For lack of news, I send you a specimen of my labors.”—­“We are here going on much as usual, —­occupied with nothing else but commerce and the money-market.  I do not think any one is thinking audibly of anything else.”—­“I have read with more pleasure than anything else that I have read lately Kane’s Arctic Explorations, i.e., his second voyage, which is certainly a wonderful story.  The whole narrative is, I think, very characteristic of the differences between the English and the American-English habits of command and obedience.”