ve
it--er--put aside. In my--er--best times--er--you remember them, my
dear boy--er--gone, gone! --no,"--with great emphasis again,--"it
comes to this--er --TWO MACBETHS!" with extraordinary energy. After
which he stood (with his glass in his hand and his old square jaw of
its old fierce form) looking defiantly at Dolby as if Dolby had
contradicted him; and then trailed off into a weak pale likeness of
himself as if his whole appearance had been some clever optical
illusion.

I am away to Scotland on Wednesday next, the 17th, to finish there.
Ireland is already disposed of, and Manchester and Liverpool will
follow within six weeks. "Like lights in a theatre, they are being
snuffed out fast," as Carlyle says of the guillotined in his
Revolution. I suppose I shall be glad when they are all snuffed out.
Anyhow, I think so now.

The N----s have a very pretty house at Kensington. He has quite
recovered, and is positively getting fat. I dined with them last
Friday at F----'s, having (marvellous to relate!) a spare day in
London. The warm weather has greatly spared F----'s bronchitis; but
I fear that he is quite unable to bear cold, or even changes of
temperature, and that he will suffer exceedingly if east-winds
obtain. One would say they must at last, for it has been blowing a
tempest from the south and southwest for weeks and weeks.

The safe arrival of my boy's ship in Australia has been telegraphed
home, but I have not yet heard from him. His post will be due a week
or so hence in London. My next boy is doing very well, I hope, at
Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Of my seafaring boy's luck in getting a
death-vacancy of First Lieutenant, aboard a new ship-of-war on the
South American Station, I heard from a friend, a captain in the
Navy, when I was at Bath the other day; though we have not yet heard
it from himself. Bath (setting aside remembrances of Roderick Random
and Humphrey Clinker) looked, I fancied, just as if a cemetery-full
of old people had somehow made a successful rise against death,
carried the place by assault, and built a city with their
gravestones; in which they were trying to look alive, but with very
indifferent success.

C---- is no better, and no worse. M---- and G---- send all manner of
loves, and have already represented to me that the red-jacketed
post