commonest principles of demand and supply as the whole of the countrymen of Turgot from the executive government downwards), and from a certain warlike tendency which seems to me to pierce through all their declarations of peace.  We hear the flourish of trumpets through all the fine phrases of the orators, and indeed it is difficult to imagine what they will do with their soi-disant ouvriers,—­workmen who have lost the habit of labor,—­unless they make soldiers of them.  In the mean time some friends of mine are about to accompany your countryman Mr. Elihu Burritt as a deputation, and doubtless M. de Lamartine will give them as eloquent an answer as heart can desire,—­no doubt he will keep peace if he can,—­but the government have certainly not hitherto shown firmness or vigor enough to make one rely upon them, if the question becomes pressing and personal.  In Italy matters seem to be very promising.  We have here one of the Silvio Pellico exiles,—­Count Carpinetta,—­whose story is quite a romance.  He is just returned from Turin, where he was received with enthusiasm, might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover some of his property, confiscated years ago by the Austrians.  It does one’s heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred to real life. Apropos of public events, all London is talking of the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming, who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in 1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 at all events.

    Ever yours, M.R.M.

    (No date, 1849)

DEAR MR. FIELDS:  I must have seemed very ungrateful in being so long silent.  But your magnificent present of books, beautiful in every sense of the word, has come dropping in volume by volume, and only arrived complete (Mr. Longfellow’s striking book being the last) about a fortnight ago, and then it found me keeping my room, as I am still doing, with a tremendous attack of neuralgia on the left side of the face.  I am getting better now by dint of blisters and tonic medicine; but I can answer for that disease well deserving its bad eminence of “painful.”  It is however, blessed be God! more manageable than it used to be; and my medical friend, a man of singular skill, promises me a cure.

I have seen things of Longfellow’s as fine as anything in Campbell or Coleridge or Tennyson or Hood.  After all, our great lyrical poets are great only for half a volume.  Look at Gray and Collins, at your own edition of the man whom one song immortalized, at Gerald Griffin, whom you perhaps do not know, and at Wordsworth, who, greatest of the great for about a hundred pages, is drowned in the flood of his own wordiness in his longer works.  To be sure, there are giants who are rich to overflowing through a whole shelf of books,—­Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and Americans, above all,—­and