In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything
else she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy;
her wounds unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have
enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results.
Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are "our own flesh and blood," and,
as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to
vote. Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have
loved that man!) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the
vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums? This may prove that last
element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have long
sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still
unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr.
Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in the
"Queen Mab" stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
condition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as
much of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind
of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle.
This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble
folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the
tribe. They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive
plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and
taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now
disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and
most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral
pyre. These biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly
prolong the memory of "old unhappy far-off things, and sorrows long