1814.]

INTENDS TO TRAVEL.

51

manners.

LETTER X.

130, Park Street, Thursday, 7th July, 1814.

YOUR plan for a journey seems to me a very good one. It embraces several highly interesting objects, and may be accomplished within a moderate time. I remember having seen my namesake formerly at New Coll. He struck me as being a sensible man, with modest, pleasing You, or he, or both have, probably, by this, obtained from a "viva voce" interrogation of some experienced traveller, all the common and elementary information as to the way of travelling, and the proper preparations for your journey. But if there still remains anything of that sort, which you think I am likely to be able to supply, I shall be happy to give the most useful answer in my power.

At Paris, I hope, we shall meet. My own plans are not yet fixed; but I rather think I shall be there about the end of this month. My stay there, however, will be very short. I have seen the Lions. As to society, there is but little to see; and (by the bye) you do quite right not to trouble yourself with letters, which, in the present state of things, would do you but little good. The French are poor, disunited and

ashamed of themselves; and, of course, they have neither the means nor the disposition to make their capital very agreeable to strangers. As to the difficulty of language, you will soon surmount that you will improve daily, and with no trouble.

On the whole you may reasonably promise yourself a great deal of pleasure from this expedition. The mere idea of being, for the first time, on a foreign land, - that land, too, being France, a country about which we have been reading and thinking all our lives, - is extremely agreeable; and the impression (to judge by my own feelings) is not soon worn out.

Go by the ancient, regular, classical way of Calais; and don't listen to any body that talks to you about Brighton and Dieppe. You may be kept two or three days at sea, if you go by Dieppe, which, even to those that have been accustomed to make voyages, is not agreeable, and to you that have not, would be a very severe inconvenience.

I am sorry you don't talk of coming to town in your last letter. You will, of course, be here in your way to France; and as, from what you say, I think it likely that you will be off before me, I shall then have the pleasure to see you, and we can talk the thing over.

I am glad they have done you justice in the

1814.]

DECLINES TAKING OFFICE.

53

B. C.; but I wish the subject were properly treated in some publication of more merit and authority.

you

Lord Byron has written another poem, which I have seen. It is very beautiful; but I doubt whether would be inclined to show any mercy to its great and palpable defect—the repetition of the same character. Lara is just the same sort of gloomy, haughty, mysterious villain as Childe Harold, the Giaour, the Corsair, and all the rest. This is a strange mixture of fertility and barrenness. One would think it was easier to invent a new character, than to describe the old one over and over again.

LETTER XI.

130, Park Street, August 9, 1814.

YOUR letter has just reached me. Before I even thank you for it I will dispatch something I had to say about myself, and which, if I had not been hurried some days, and lazy on others, I should have written to acquaint you with a week ago. It is merely that I do not take the office that was proposed to me by Canning. The more I thought of the arrangement, as far as it respected myself,

the less I was satisfied with it, and as those friends whom the publicity of the whole thing (for it soon became known) gave me an opportunity of consulting were for the far greater part of my opinion, I retracted my consent, and devolved the honours of the Privy Council upon Lord Binning. Canning thinks I have judged ill. Perhaps I have, but there is at least this comfort, that if, having declined, I afterwards think that I ought to have accepted, my regret will be of a less painful kind than if, having accepted, I should afterwards see cause to wish I had declined.

By-the-bye, the dæmon of ambition has just thrown another temptation in my way. A peerage promised to Lord Granville Leveson Gower is expected soon to make a vacancy for the county of Stafford, and I have just received an unsolicited offer of support from the Marquis of Stafford, whose rank and connexions make him one of the most considerable individuals among us. My own family influence is not small, and I know of no person that would be a formidable competitor, but still I do not feel inclined to try it. It would derange all my present plans in a most provoking way, and, after all, considering how many things happen between the cup and the lip, it is not by any means impossible that the vacancy might never occur. But it is hardly fair

1814.]

TRAVELLING IMPRESSIONS.

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to trouble you with a long story about English county politics, when you are in a situation, which, as I well know, is of all others least calculated to dispose one's mind to listen to it with patience.

The impression France has made upon you is exactly what I wished and expected. I don't like grumbling travellers, unless they can make out a very strong case of complaint; and the country you have just gone through is so fine and fruitful, the accommodations of almost every kind so good, the capital so magnificent, and the people so gay, ingenious, and obliging, that I am apt to judge of a person's sensibility, good taste, and good nature, by the degree to which he is pleased with them. The power of enjoying the harmless and reasonable pleasures of life is not only very essential to a man's happiness, but an indication of several valuable qualities both of the heart and the head which can hardly exist without it. I am so thoroughly convinced of this, that I do not scruple to own having conceived a strong prejudice against several persons, who, seeing France for the first time, pretended not to be pleased, and probably were not. And I can safely add, that wherever I knew any thing of the parties, my acquaintance with their general character always justified the conclusion I had been led to form by the particular circumstance.