and it casts a certain discouragement over one’s communications.  However, I hope that this letter will reach you, and that you will be assured that the fault does not lie at my door.

During the last year or two my health has been declining much, and I am just now thinking of taking a journey to Paris.  My friend, Henry Chorley of the Athenaeum, the first musical critic of Europe, is going thither next month to assist at the production of Meyerbeer’s Prophete at the French Opera, and another friend will accompany me and my little maid to take care of us; so that I have just hopes that the excursion, erenow much facilitated by railways, may do me good.  I have always been a great admirer of the great Emperor, and to see the heir of Napoleon at the Elysee seems to me a real piece of poetical justice.  I know many of his friends in England, who all speak of him most highly; one of them says, “He is the very impersonation of calm and simple honesty.”  I hope the nation will be true to him, but, as Mirabeau says, “there are no such words as ‘jamais’ or ‘toujours’ with the French public.”

    10th of June, 1849.

I have been waiting to answer your most kind and interesting letter, dear Mr. Fields, until I could announce to you a publication that Mr. Colburn has been meditating and pressing me for, but which, chiefly I believe from my own fault in not going to town, and not liking to give him or Mr. Shoberl the trouble of coming here, is now probably adjourned to the autumn.  The fact is that I have been and still am very poorly.  We are stricken in our vanities, and the only things that I recollect having ever been immoderately proud of—­my garden and my personal activity—­have both now turned into causes of shame and pity; the garden, declining from one bad gardener to worse, has become a ploughed field,—­and I myself, from a severe attack of rheumatism, and since then a terrible fright in a pony-chaise, am now little better than a cripple.  However, if there be punishment here below, there are likewise consolations,—­everybody is kind to me; I retain the vivid love of reading, which is one of the highest pleasures of life; and very interesting persons come to see me sometimes, from both sides of the water,—­witness, dear Mr. Fields, our present correspondence.  One such person arrived yesterday in the shape of Doctor ——­, who has been working musical miracles in Scotland, (think of making singing teachers of children of four or five years of age!) and is now on his way to Paris, where, having been during seven years one of the editors of the National, he will find most of his colleagues of the newspaper filling the highest posts in the government.  What is the American opinion of that great experiment; or, rather, what is yours?  I wish it success from the bottom of my heart, but I am a, little afraid, from their total want of political economy (we have not a school-girl so ignorant of the