Very faithfully yours.

[Sidenote: The same.]

COVENT GARDEN, _Sunday, Noon (December, 1844)._

MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON,

Business for other people (and by no means of a pleasant kind) has held
me prisoner during two whole days, and will so detain me to-day, in the
very agony of my departure for Italy again, that I shall not even be
able to reach Gore House once more, on which I had set my heart. I
cannot bear the thought of going away without some sort of reference to
the happy day you gave me on Monday, and the pleasure and delight I had
in your earnest greeting. I shall never forget it, believe me. It would
be worth going to China--it would be worth going to America, to come
home again for the pleasure of such a meeting with you and Count
D'Orsay--to whom my love, and something as near it to Miss Power and her
sister as it is lawful to send. It will be an unspeakable satisfaction
to me (though I am not maliciously disposed) to know under your own
hand at Genoa that my little book made you cry. I hope to prove a better
correspondent on my return to those shores. But better or worse, or any
how, I am ever, my dear Lady Blessington, in no common degree, and not
with an every-day regard, yours.

Very faithfully yours.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] On the occasion of a great meeting of the Mechanics' Institution at
Liverpool, with Charles Dickens in the chair.

[22] He had also presided two evenings previously at a meeting of the
Polytechnic Institution at Birmingham.

[23] A character in a Play, well known at this time.

[24] "Studies of Sensation and Event."

1845.

[Sidenote: The same.]

GENOA, _May 9th, 1845._

MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON,

Once more in my old quarters, and with rather a tired sole to my foot,
from having found such an immense number of different resting-places for
it since I went away. I write you my last Italian letter for this bout,
designing to leave here, please God, on the ninth of next month, and to
be in London again by the end of June. I am looking forward with great
delight to the pleasure of seeing you once more, and mean to come to
Gore House with such a swoop as shall astonish the poodle, if, after
being accustomed to his own size and sense, he retain the power of being
astonished at anything in the wide world. You know where I have been,