The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation.  Along with these two “Articles” (to be sent by Liverpool; there are two of them, Diamond Necklace and Mirabeau), you will very probably get some stray Proofsheet—­of the unutterable French Revolution! It is actually at Press; two Printers working at separate Volumes of it,—­though still too slow.  In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it!  You, I hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in!  I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both.  No such spell shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come!  A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place!  And yet I ought not to say so:  there is a great blessing in a man’s doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in.  Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination I have had; perhaps I shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood.  The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying under my feet; a mean imbroglio, which I never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with:  welcome and welcome to go wholly its own way; I wholly clear for going mine.  Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep.  The residue is vague as the wind,—­unheeded as the wind.  Some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse:  any way,—­or even no way, if that be it,—­I shall be content.  There is a scheme here among Friends for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution; but it will not do there, I think.  The instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I can teach them,—­then we will, most readily, as Burns says, “loose our tinkler jaw”; but not I think till then; were the Institution even Imperial.

America has faded considerably into the background of late:  indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God’s sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, ’and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore.  A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream!  To rest through the summer:  that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain.—­ What a pity this poor sheet is done!  I had innumerable things to tell you about people whom I have seen, about books,—­Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament, Literature and the Life of Man,—­the whole of which must lie over till next time.  Write to me; do not forget me.  My Wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends “kindest remembrances,” “compliments” she expressly does not send.  Good be with you always, my dear Friend!