until last night to read Lady De
Lancey's narrative, and, but for your letter, I should not
have mastered it even then. One glance at it, when, through
your kindness, it first arrived, had impressed me with a
foreboding of its terrible truth, and I really have shrunk
from it in pure lack of heart.

"After working at Barnaby all day, and wandering about the
most wretched and distressful streets for a couple of hours
in the evening--searching for some pictures I wanted to
build upon--I went at it, at about ten o'clock. To say that
the reading that most astonishing and tremendous account has
constituted an epoch in my life--that I shall never forget
the lightest word of it--that I cannot throw the impression
aside, and never saw anything so real, so touching, and so
actually present before my eyes, is nothing. I am husband
and wife, dead man and living woman, Emma and General
Dundas, doctor and bedstead--everything and everybody (but
the Prussian officer--damn him) all in one. What I have
always looked upon as masterpieces of powerful and
affecting description, seem as nothing in my eyes. If I live
for fifty years, I shall dream of it every now and then,
from this hour to the day of my death, with the most
frightful reality. The slightest mention of a battle will
bring the whole thing before me. I shall never think of the
Duke any more but as he stood in his shirt with the officer
in full-dress uniform, or as he dismounted from his horse
when the gallant man was struck down. It is a striking proof
of the power of that most extraordinary man, Defoe, that I
seem to recognise in every line of the narrative something
of him. Has this occurred to you? The going to Waterloo with
that unconsciousness of everything in the road, but the
obstacles to getting on--the shutting herself up in her room
and determining not to hear--the not going to the door when
the knocking came--the finding out by her wild spirits when
she heard he was safe, how much she had feared when in doubt
and anxiety--the desperate desire to move towards him--the
whole description of the cottage, and its condition; and
their daily shifts and contrivances, and the lying down
beside him in the bed and both _falling asleep_; and his
resolving not to serve any more, but t