’They say, will things end utterly?—­all our gains be lost?  The question seems to me to come of that love of earth which is recognition of God:  for if they cannot reconcile themselves to believe in extinction, to what must they be looking?  It is a confirmation of your saying, that love leads to God, through art or in acts.

’You will regret to hear that the project of Captain Beauchamp’s voyage is in danger of being abandoned.  A committee of a vacant Radical borough has offered to nominate him.  My influence is weak; madame would have him go back with her and her brother to Normandy.  My influence is weak, I suppose, because he finds me constantly leaning to expediency—­I am your pupil.  It may be quite correct that powder is intended for explosion we do not therefore apply a spark to the barrel.  I ventured on that.  He pitied me in the snares of simile and metaphor.  He is the same, you perceive.  How often have we not discussed what would have become of him, with that “rocket brain” of his, in less quiet times!  Yet, when he was addressing a deputation of workmen the other day, he recommended patience to them as one of the virtues that count under wisdom.  He is curiously impatient for knowledge.  One of his reasons for not accepting Colonel Halkett’s offer of his yacht is, that he will not be able to have books enough on board.  Definite instead of vast and hazy duties are to be desired for him, I think.  Most fervently I pray that he will obtain a ship and serve some years.  At the risk of your accusing me of “sententious posing,” I would say, that men who do not live in the present chiefly, but hamper themselves with giant tasks in excess of alarm for the future, however devoted and noble they may be—­and he is an example of one that is—­reduce themselves to the dimensions of pigmies; they have the cry of infants.  You reply, Foresight is an element of love of country and mankind.  But how often is not the foresight guess-work?  ’He has not spoken of the dawn project.  To-day he is repeating one of uncle’s novelties—­“Sultry Tories.”  The sultry Tory sits in the sun and prophecies woefully of storm, it appears.  Your accusation that I am one at heart amuses me; I am not quite able to deny it.  “Sultriness” I am not conscious of.  But it would appear to be an epithet for the Conservatives of wealth.  So that England, being very wealthy, we are to call it a sultry country?  You are much wanted, for where there is no “middleman Liberal” to hold the scales for them, these two have it all their own way, which is not good for them.

Captain Beauchamp quotes you too.  It seems that you once talked to him of a machine for measuring the force of blows delivered with the fist, and compared his efforts to those of one perpetually practising at it:  and this you are said to have called “The case of the Constitutional Realm and the extreme Radical.”  Elsewhere the Radical smites at iron or rotten wood; in England it is a cushion on springs.  Did you say it?  He quotes it as yours, half acquiescingly, and ruefully.