This of obstinacy is the one quality I still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last.  Pray for me; I will complain no more at present.  General Washington gained the freedom of America—­ chiefly by this respectable quality I talk of; nor can a history of Frederick be written, in Chelsea in the year 1855, except as against hope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner.

We are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me!  “Balaklava,” I can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the English language henceforth:  it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in English life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all a Balaklava these many years.  A Balaklava now yielding, under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs,—­towards the bottomless Pool, if some flooring be not found.  To me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one. Altum Silentium, what else can I reply to it at present?  The Turk War, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on, without any general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff. Ach Gott! Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business?  We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only housebreaker qualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones, or go to the Devil); and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued a thief in all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling a General as Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri,—­we have got into a very strange problem indeed!—­But there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world.  They have not done yet, I calculate, by any manner of means:  they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating often),—­and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again.  Pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls!—­Before my paper quite end, I must