harles.

Mr. Nicolas Trubner, whom I had not seen since 1856, came with his wife
and daughter to Spa, and this was the beginning of a great intimacy which
lasted to his death. Which meeting reminds me of something amusing. I
had written the first third of "Breitmann as a Politician," which J.
"Camden" Hotten had republished, promising the public to give them the
rest before long. This I prevented by copyrighting the two remaining
thirds in England! Being very angry at this, Hotten accused me in print
of having written this conclusion expressly to disappoint and injure
_him_! In fact, he really seemed to think that Mr. Trubner and I were
only a pair of foreign rogues, bound together to wrong Mr. J. C. Hotten
out of his higher rights in "Breitmann." I wrote a pamphlet in which I
said this and some other things very plainly. Mr. Trubner showed this to
his lawyer, who was of the opinion that it could not be published because
it bore on libel, though there was nothing in it worse than what I have
here said. However, Mr. Trubner had it privately printed, and took great
joy, solace, and comfort for a very long time in reading it to his
friends after dinner, or on other occasions, and as he had many, it got
pretty well about London. I may here very truly remark that Mr. Hotten,
in the public controversy which he had with Mr. Trubner on the subject of
my "Ballads," displayed an effrontery absolutely without parallel in
modern times, apropos of which _Punch_ remarked--

"The name of Curll will never be forgotten,
And neither will be thine, John Camden Hotten."

From Spa we went to Brussels, where I remember to have seen many times at
work in the gallery the famous artist without arms who painted with his
toes. What was quite a remarkable was the excellence of his copies from
Rembrandt. Nature succeeded in his case in "heaping voonders oopen
voonders," as Tom Hood says in his "Rhine." I became well acquainted
with Tom Hood the younger in after years, and to this day I contribute
something every year to _Tom Hood's Annual_. At Brussels we stayed at a
charming old hotel which had galleries one above the other round the
courtyard, exactly like those of the White Hart Inn immortalised in
"Pickwick." There was in Philadelphia a perfect specimen of such an inn,
which has of late years been rebuilt as the Bingham House. While in Spa
I studied Walloon.

From Brussels to Ghent, which I found much modernised from wha