around them in the shape of an English pleasure ground, blooming with
rare shrubs and flowers.

Our old friend, Mr. Douglas Kinnaird--"the honourable Dug," as poor
Lord Byron used to call him--paid me a visit to-day. I had not seen him
for seven years, and these same years have left their traces on his
brow. He is in delicate health, and is only come over to Paris for a
very few days.

He has lived in the same scenes and in the same routine that we left
him, wholly engrossed by them, while

"I've taught me other tongues, and in strange eyes
Have made me not a stranger;"

and wonder how people can be content to dwell whole years in so
circumscribed, however useful, a circle.

Those who live much in London seem to me to have tasted the lotus
which, according to the fable of old, induced forgetfulness of the
past, so wholly are they engrossed by the present, and by the vortex in
which they find themselves plunged.

Much as I like England, and few love it more dearly, I should not like
to pass all the rest of my life in it. _All, all_: it is thus we ever
count on futurity, reckoning as if our lives were certain of being
prolonged, when we know not that the _all_ on which we so boldly
calculate may not be terminated in a day, nay, even in an hour. Who is
there that can boast an English birth, that would not wish to die at
home and rest in an English grave?