LONDON, Jan. 5 1874.

MY DEAR OLD JOE,--I knew you would be likely to graduate into an ass if
I came away; and so you have--if you have stopped smoking. However,
I have a strong faith that it is not too late, yet, and that the
judiciously managed influence of a bad example will fetch you back
again.

I wish you had written me some news--Livy tells me precious little. She
mainly writes to hurry me home and to tell me how much she respects me:
but she's generally pretty slow on news. I had a letter from her along
with yours, today, but she didn't tell me the book is out. However, it's
all right. I hope to be home 20 days from today, and then I'll see her,
and that will make up for a whole year's dearth of news. I am right down
grateful that she is looking strong and "lovelier than ever." I only
wish I could see her look her level best, once--I think it would be a
vision.

I have just spent a good part of this day browsing through the Royal
Academy Exhibition of Landseer's paintings. They fill four or five
great salons, and must number a good many hundreds. This is the only
opportunity ever to see them, because the finest of them belong to
the queen and she keeps them in her private apartments. Ah, they're
wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights and dusks in "The
Challenge" and "The Combat;" and in that long flight of birds across
a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise--for no man can ever
tell tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning
mist breathing itself up from the water). And there is such a grave
analytical profundity in the faces of "The Connoisseurs;" and such
pathos in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy
waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not
asleep. And the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood--insomuch
that if the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living
animal placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which.

I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest
a cartoon for Punch. It was this. In one of the Academy salons (in the
suite where these pictures are), a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
pedestal in the centre of the room. I suggest that some of Landseer's
best known animals be represented as having come down out of their
frames in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in
mourning attitudes.

Well, ol