of weeks you would have heard from me again at any rate.—­Your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time.  Nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score.—­If only these Cincinnati Patricians can find me here when they come?  For I am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native Scotland probably) so soon as I can shake the final tag rags of Printer people off me;—­“surely within three weeks now!” I say to myself.  But I shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will stand to her point, I hope.

That book on Friedrich of Prussia—­first half of it, two swoln unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his Father, &c., and leave him at his accession—­is just getting out of my hands.  One packet more of Proofs, and I have done with it,—­thanks to all the gods!  No job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out for me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad negative one, “Shall we be beaten in our old days, then?”—­But it has thoroughly humbled me,—­trampled me down into the mud, there to wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of Mankind, German, English, French, and other, for all have borne a hand in these sad centuries;—­and here I emerge at last, not killed, but almost as good.  Seek not to look at the Book,—­nay in fact it is “not to be published till September” (so the man of affairs settles with me yesterday, “owing to the political &c., to the season,” &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days I should be utterly out of it,—­not to hear of it again till the Day of Judgment, and if possible not even then!  In fact it is a bad book, poor, misshapen, feeble, nearly worthless (thanks to past generations and to me); and my one excuse is, I could not make it better, all the world having played such a game with it.  Well, well!—­How true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras!  Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much.  And in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,—­unless sheer Fate force him to do it;—­and then he ought (if not of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather.  That is deliberately my opinion,—­or far nearer it than you will believe.

Once or twice I caught some tone of you in some American Magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the only thing that is speech at all among my fellow-creatures in this time.  For the years that remain, I suppose we must continue to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind:  what can we do, at this late stage?  But in the real “Model Republic,” it would have been different with two good boys of this kind!—­