, I am immovable in my conviction that the impression it would
produce would be one of failure, and a reduction of yourself to the
level of those who do the like here. To us who know the Boston names and
honour them, and who know Boston and like it (Boston is what I would
have the whole United States to be), the Boston requisition would be a
valuable document, of which you and your friends might be proud. But
those names are perfectly unknown to the public here, and would produce
not the least effect. The only thing known to the public here is, that
they ask (when I say "they" I mean the people) everybody to lecture. It
is one of the things I have ridiculed in "Chuzzlewit." Lecture you, and
you fall into the roll of Lardners, Vandenhoffs, Eltons, Knowleses,
Buckinghams. You are off your pedestal, have flung away your glass
slipper, and changed your triumphal coach into a seedy old pumpkin. I am
quite sure of it, and cannot express my strong conviction in language of
sufficient force.

"Puff-ridden!" why to be sure they are. The nation is a miserable
Sindbad, and its boasted press the loathsome, foul old man upon his
back, and yet they will tell you, and proclaim to the four winds for
repetition here, that they don't need their ignorant and brutal papers,
as if the papers could exist if they didn't need them! Let any two of
these vagabonds, in any town you go to, take it into their heads to make
you an object of attack, or to direct the general attention elsewhere,
and what avail those wonderful images of passion which you have been all
your life perfecting!

I have sent you, to the charge of our trusty and well-beloved Colden, a
little book I published on the 17th of December, and which has been a
most prodigious success--the greatest, I think, I have ever achieved. It
pleases me to think that it will bring you home for an hour or two, and
I long to hear you have read it on some quiet morning. Do they allow you
to be quiet, by-the-way? "Some of our most fashionable people, sir,"
denounced me awfully for liking to be alone sometimes.

Now that we have turned Christmas, I feel as if your face were directed
homewards, Macready. The downhill part of the road is before us now, and
we shall travel on to midsummer at a dashing pace; and, please Heaven, I
will be at Liverpool when you come steaming up the Mersey, with that red
funnel smoking out unutterable things, and your heart much fuller than
your trunks, though something