n and Havre on the 26th inst., to be prepared for
sailing.

"I am visiting old friends and renewing old associations in London.
Twenty years make a vast difference as well in the aspect of this great
city as in the faces of old acquaintances. London may be said literally
to have gone into the country. Where I once was accustomed to walk in the
fields, so far out of town as even to shoot at a target against the trees
with impunity, now there are spacious streets and splendid houses and
gardens.

"I spend a good deal of my spare time with Leslie. He is the same
amiable, intelligent, unassuming gentleman that I left in 1815. He is
painting a little picture--'Sterne recovering his Manuscripts from the
Curls of his Hostess at Lyons.' I have been sitting to him for the head
of Sterne, whom he thinks I resemble very strongly. At any rate, he has
made no alteration in the character of the face from the one he had drawn
from Sterne's portrait, and has simply attended to the expression.

"When I left Paris I was feeble in health, so much so that I was fearful
of the effects of the journey to London, especially as I passed through
villages suffering severely from the cholera. But I proceeded moderately,
lodged the first night at Boulogne-sur-Mer, crossed to Dover in a severe
southwest gale, and passed the next night at Canterbury, and the next day
came to London. I think the ride did me good, and I have been exercising
a great deal, riding and walking, since, and my general health is
certainly improving. I am in hopes that the voyage will completely set me
up again."

CHAPTER XX

Morse's life almost equally divided into two periods, artistic and
scientific.--Estimate of his artistic ability by Daniel Huntington.--Also
by Samuel Isham.--His character as revealed by his letters, notes, etc.--
End of Volume I.

Morse's long life (he was eighty-one when he died) was almost exactly
divided, by the nature of his occupations, into two equal periods. During
the first, up to his forty-first year, he was wholly the artist,
enthusiastic, filled with a laudable ambition to excel, not only for
personal reasons, but, as appears from his correspondence, largely from
patriotic motives, from a wish to rescue his country from the stigma of
pure commercialism which it had incurred in the eyes of the rest of the
world. It is true that his active brain and warm heart spurred him on to
interest himself in many other things, in inventions o