You see I have taken your advice, and, moreover, your paper, in order that, in spite of the dispersion of Parliament and the unattainability of franks, our correspondence may lose nothing in bulk, though it must in frequency.  I think you are behaving very shabbily in not writing to me.  Are you consulting your own pleasure, or my purse?  I dedicate so much of my income to purposes which go under the head of “money thrown away;” don’t you think the cost of our correspondence may be added to that without seriously troubling my conscience?  What shall I say to you?  “Reform” is on the tip of my pen, and great as are our private matters of anxiety, they scarcely outweigh in our minds the national interest that is engrossing almost every thinking person throughout the country.  You know I am no politician, and my shallow causality and want of adequate information alike unfit me from understanding, much less discussing, public questions of great importance; but the present crisis has aroused me to intense interest and anxiety about the course events are taking.  You can have no conception of the state of excitement prevailing in London at this moment.  The scene in the House of Lords immediately preceding the dissolution the papers will have described to you, though if the spectators and participators in it may be believed, the tumult, the disorder, the Billingsgate uproar on that occasion would not be easy to describe.  Lord Londonderry, it seems, thought that the days of faust-recht had come back again, and I fancy more than he are of that opinion.

An illumination was immediately ordered by the Lord Mayor Donkin (or key, as “t’other side” call him); but, owing to the shortness of the notice he gave, it seems the show of light was not satisfactory to the tallow chandler part of the population, so another was appointed two nights after.  My mother and the two Harrys went out in the open carriage to drive through the streets.  I was depressed and disinclined for sight-seeing, and did not go, which I regretted afterward, as all strong exhibitions of public feeling are curious and interesting.  They say the crowd was immense in all the principal thoroughfares, and of the lowest order.  They testified their approbation of the various illuminated devices by shouts and hurrahs and applause; their displeasure against the various non-illuminators was more violently manifested by assailing their houses and breaking their windows.

Sundry were the glass sacrifices offered at the shrine of consistent Tory patriotism at the West End of the town.  The mottoes and sentences on some of the illuminations were noteworthy for their democratic flavor:  “The king and the people,” “The people of England,” “The glorious dissolution,” “The glorious reform,” “The people and the press,” “The people’s triumph.”  A man who seemed by his dress to belong to the very lowest class (a cross apparently between