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To John Kenyon

[Paris], 138 Avenue des Ch.-Elysees:  February 15, 1852.

My dearest Mr. Kenyon,—­Robert sends you his Shelley,[12] having a very few copies allowed to him to dispose of.  I think you have Shelley’s other letters, of which this volume is the supplement, and you will not be sorry to have Robert’s preface thrown in, though he makes very light of it himself.

You never write a word to us, and so I don’t mean to send you a letter to-day—­only as few lines as I can drop in a sulky fit, repenting as I go on.  As to politics, you know you have all put me in the corner because I stand up for universal suffrage, and am weak enough to fancy that seven millions and a half of Frenchmen have some right to an opinion on their own affairs.  It’s really fatal in this world to be consequent—­it leads one into damnable errors.  So I shall not say much more at present.  You must bear with me—­dear Miss Bayley and all of you—­and believe of me, if I am ever so wrong, that I do at least pray from my soul, ’May the right prevail!’—­loving right, truth, justice, and the people through whatever mistakes.  As it was in the beginning, from ‘Casa Guidi Windows,’ so it is now from the Avenue des Champs-Elysees.  I am most humanly liable, of course, to make mistakes, and am by temperament perhaps over hopeful and sanguine.  But I do see with my own eyes and feel with my own spirit, and not with other people’s eyes and spirits, though they should happen to be the dearest—­and that’s the very best of me, be certain, so don’t quarrel with it too much.

As to the worst of the President, let him have vulture’s beak, hyena’s teeth, and the rattle of the great serpent, it’s nothing to the question.  Let him be Caligula’s horse raised to the consulship—­what then?  I am not a Buonapartist; I am simply a ‘democrat,’ as you say.  I simply hold to the fact that, such as he is, the people chose him, and to the opinion that they have a right to choose whom they please.  When your English Press denies the fact of the choice (a fact which the most passionate of party-men does not think of denying here), I seem to have a right to another opinion which might strike you as unpatriotic if I uttered it in this place. Hic tacet, then, rather jacet.

For the rest, for heaven’s sake and the truth’s, do let us try to take breath a little and be patient.  Let us wait till the dust of the struggle clears away before we take measures of the circus.  We can’t have the liberty of a regular government under a dictatorship.  And if the ‘constitution’ which is coming is not model, it may wear itself into shape by being worked calmly.  These new boots will be easier to the feet after half an hour’s walking.  Not that I like the pinching meanwhile.  Not that stringencies upon the Press please me—­no, nor arrests and imprisonments.  I like these things,