nd. I have gone back to Italy after ten
years, and found the best men I had known there exiled or in jail. I
believe they have the faults you ascribe to them (nationally, not
individually), but I could not find it in my heart, remembering their
miseries, to exhibit those faults without referring them back to their
causes. You will forgive my writing this, because I write it exactly as
I write my cordial little tribute to the high merits of your book. If
it were not a living reality to me, I should care nothing about this
point of disagreement; but you are far too earnest a man, and far too
able a man, to be left unremonstrated with by an admiring reader. You
cannot write so well without influencing many people. If you could tell
me that your book had but twenty readers, I would reply, that so good a
book will influence more people's opinions, through those twenty, than a
worthless book would through twenty thousand; and I express this with
the perfect confidence of one in whose mind the book has taken, for good
and all, a separate and distinct place.

Accept my thanks for the pleasure you have given me. The poor
acknowledgment of testifying to that pleasure wherever I go will be my
pleasure in return. And so, my dear Chorley, good night, and God bless
you.

Ever faithfully yours.

[Sidenote: Sir John Bowring.]

GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, 31st October, 1860._

MY DEAR SIR JOHN,[70]

First let me congratulate you on your marriage and wish you all
happiness and prosperity.

Secondly, I must tell you that I was greatly vexed with the Chatham
people for not giving me early notice of your lecture. In that case I
should (of course) have presided, as President of the Institution, and I
should have asked you to honour my Falstaff house here. But when they
made your kind intention known to me, I had made some important business
engagements at the "All the Year Round" office for that evening, which I
could not possibly forego. I charged them to tell you so, and was going
to write to you when I found your kind letter.

Thanks for your paper, which I have sent to the Printer's with much
pleasure.

We heard of your accident here, and of your "making nothing of it." I
said that you didn't make much of disasters, and that you took poison
(from natives) as quite a matter of course in the way of business.