do your part so manfully
and be left alone in the conflict. I felt you to be all you are the
first moment I saw you. I know you will accept my regard and fidelity
for what they are worth.

Dear Layard, very heartily yours.

[Sidenote: Mr. Austen H. Layard.]

TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, April 10th, 1855._

DEAR LAYARD,

I shall of course observe the strictest silence, at present, in
reference to your resolutions. It will be a most acceptable occupation
to me to go over them with you, and I have not a doubt of their
producing a strong effect out of doors.

There is nothing in the present time at once so galling and so alarming
to me as the alienation of the people from their own public affairs. I
have no difficulty in understanding it. They have had so little to do
with the game through all these years of Parliamentary Reform, that they
have sullenly laid down their cards, and taken to looking on. The
players who are left at the table do not see beyond it, conceive that
gain and loss and all the interest of the play are in their hands, and
will never be wiser until they and the table and the lights and the
money are all overturned together. And I believe the discontent to be so
much the worse for smouldering, instead of blazing openly, that it is
extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the
first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned by any one of a
thousand accidents--a bad harvest--the last strain too much of
aristocratic insolence or incapacity--a defeat abroad--a mere chance at
home--with such a devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld
since.

Meanwhile, all our English tuft-hunting, toad-eating, and other
manifestations of accursed gentility--to say nothing of the Lord knows
who's defiances of the proven truth before six hundred and fifty
men--ARE expressing themselves every day. So, every day, the disgusted
millions with this unnatural gloom are confirmed and hardened in the
very worst of moods. Finally, round all this is an atmosphere of
poverty, hunger, and ignorant desperation, of the mere existence of
which perhaps not one man in a thousand of those not actually enveloped
in it, through the whole extent of this country, has the least idea.

It seems to me an absolute impossibility to direct the spirit of the
people at this pass until it shows itself. If they begin to bestir
themselves in the vigo