you anything beyond inconvenience. How a private sec. should
permit himself the luxury of an attack of influenza I cannot conceive.
We shall hear of one's hairdresser having the impertinence to catch
cold, to-morrow or next day!

If I don't mistake, it was you yourself recommended Crawley to me, and I
am only half grateful for the service. He is a man of small prejudices;
fancies that he ought to have a regular hour for dinner; thinks that
he should have acquaintances; and will persist in imagining himself an
existent something, appertaining to the Legation,--while, in reality, he
is only a shadowy excrescence of my own indolent habits, the recipient
of the trashy superfluities one commits to paper and calls despatches.
Latterly, in my increasing laziness, I have used him for more intimate
correspondence; and, as Doctor Allitore has now denied me all manual
exertion whatever, I am actually wholly dependent on such aid. I'm
sure I long for the discovery of some other mode of transmitting one's
brain-efforts than by the slow process of manuscript,--some photographic
process that, by a series of bright pictures, might display _en tableau_
what one is now reduced to accomplish by narrative. As it ever did and
ever will happen too, they have deluged me with work when I crave rest.
Every session of Parliament must have its blue-book; and by the devil's
luck they have decided that Italy is to furnish the present one.

You have always been a soldier, and whenever your inspecting general
came his round, your whole care has been to make the troop horses look
as fat, the men's whiskers as trim, their overalls as clean, and their
curb-chains as bright, as possible. You never imagined or dreamed of a
contingency when it would be desirable that the animals should be all
sorebacked, the whole regiment under stoppages, and the trumpeter in a
quinsy. Had you been a diplomatist instead of a dragoon, this view of
things might, perhaps, have presented itself, and the chief object
of your desire have been to show that the system under which you
functionated worked as ill as need be; that the court to which you were
accredited abhorred you; its Ministers snubbed, its small officials
slighted you; that all your communications were ill received, your
counsels ill taken; that what you reprobated was adopted, what you
advised rejected; in fact, that the only result of your presence was the
maintenance of a perpetual ill-will and bad feeling; an