The cities have grown worse as we advanced.  At Namur we reached a dirty city, situated in a romantic country; the Meuse there reminded me of the Thames from your delightful house, an island in size and shape resembling that upon which I have often wished for a grove of poplars, coming just in the same position.  From thence along the river to this abominable place, the country is, for the greater part, as lovely as can be imagined....

Our weather hitherto has been delightful.  This was especially fortunate at Waterloo and at Ligny, where we had much ground to walk over.  It would surprise you to see how soon nature has recovered from the injuries of war.  The ground is ploughed and sown, and grain and flowers and seeds already growing over the field of battle, which is still strewn with vestiges of the slaughter, caps, cartridges, boxes, hats, &c.  We picked up some French cards and some bullets, and we purchased a French pistol and two of the eagles which the infantry wear upon their caps.  What I felt upon this ground, it would be difficult to say; what I saw, and still more what I heard, there is no time at present for saying.  In prose and in verse you shall some day hear the whole.  At Les Quatre Bras, I saw two graves, which probably the dogs or the swine had opened.  In the one were the ribs of a human body, projecting through the mould; in the other, the whole skeleton exposed.  Some of our party told me of a third, in which the worms were at work, but I shrunk from the sight.  You will rejoice to hear that the English are as well spoken of for their deportment in peace as in war.  It is far otherwise with the Prussians.  Concerning them there is but one opinion; their brutality is said to exceed that of the French, and of their intolerable insolence I have heard but too many proofs.  That abominable old Frederic made them a military nation, and this is the inevitable consequence.  This very day we passed a party on their way towards France—­some hundred or two.  Two gentlemen and two ladies of the country, in a carriage, had come up with them; and these ruffians would not allow them to pass, but compelled them to wait and follow the slow pace of foot soldiers!  This we ourselves saw.  Next to the English, the Belgians have the best character for discipline....

I bought at Bruges a French History of Brazil, just published by M. Alphonse de Beauchamp, in 3 vols. 8vo.  He says, in his Preface, that having finished the first two volumes, he thought it advisable to see if any new light had been thrown upon the subject by modern authors.  Meantime, a compilation upon this history had appeared in England, but the English author, Mr. Southey, had brought no new lights; he had promised much for his second volume, but the hope of literary Europe had been again deceived, for this second volume, so emphatically promised, had not appeared.  I dare say no person regrets this delay so much as M. Beauchamp, he having stolen the whole of his two first volumes, and about the third part of the other, from the very Mr. Southey whom he abuses.  He has copied my references as the list of his own authorities (MSS. and all), and he has committed blunders which prove, beyond all doubt, that he does not understand Portuguese.  I have been much diverted by this fellow’s impudence.