deal of trouble to understand, and is
hardly worth understanding. It has many peculiar beauties, but
against them one sets the strange and nearly frantic passages
about war; which one can hardly tell whether he means to be taken
for sense or ravings. Frank Doyle, who is essentially a poet
though an unwrought one, declares _Guinevere_ the finest poem of
modern times.

_1860_

_Hawarden, Oct. 3._--We are exceedingly happy at Penmaenmawr,
between Italy, health, hill, and sea all taken together. I do not
know if you are acquainted with the Welsh coast and interior; but
I am sure you would think it well worth knowing both for the
solitary grandeur of the Snowdon group, and for the widely
diffused and almost endless beauty of detail. It is a kind of
landscape jewellery.

The Herberts send us an excellent account of Lord Aberdeen. I have
a very interesting letter from Lacaita, fresh from Panizzi, who
again was fresh from Italy, and sanguine about the Emperor. But
what a calamity for a man to think, or find himself forced to be
double faced even when he is not double minded; and this is the
best supposition. But Warsaw is surely the point at which for the
present we must look with suspicion and aversion. To-day's papers
give good hope that Garibaldi has been misrepresented and does not
mean to play into Mazzini's hands.

Thanks for your condolences about the _Times_. I have had it both
ways, though more, perhaps, of the one than the other. Some of the
penny press, which has now acquired an enormous expansion, go
great lengths in my favour, and I read some eulogies quite as wide
of fact as the interpretations.

_Oct. 19._--I think Mr. or Sir something Burke (how ungrateful!)
has been so kind as to discover the honours of my mother's descent
in some book that he has published on royal descents. But the
truth is that time plays strange tricks backwards as well as
forwards, and it seems hardly fair to pick the results. The
arithmetic of those questions is very curious: at the distance of
a moderate number of centuries everybody has some hundred thousand
ancestors, subject, however, to deduction.

_Nov. 1._--... There is one proposition which the experience of
life burns into my soul; it is this, that man should beware of
letting his religion spoil his morality. In a thou