disputing for a bottle of wine, subject to the petty tyranny of Sir
Hudson Lowe! I regret that England permitted that trampling upon the
fallen. What an excellent dialogue of the dead might be written between
Buonaparte and Themistocles!

Ages ago I sent _Bracebridge Hall_ to Merrion Street for you: have you
got it? Next week another book will be there for you--an American novel
Mrs. Griffith sent to me, _The Spy_; quite new scenes and characters,
humour and pathos, a picture of America in Washington's time; a surgeon
worthy of Smollett or Moore, and quite different from any of their
various surgeons; and an Irishwoman, Betty Flanagan, incomparable.


_August 3._

What do you think is my employment out of doors, and what it has been
this week past? My garden? no such elegant thing; but making a gutter! a
sewer and a pathway in the street of Edgeworthstown; and I do declare I
am as much interested about it as I ever was in writing anything in my
life. We have never here yet found it necessary to have recourse to
public contribution for the poor, but it is necessary to give some
assistance to the labouring class; and I find that making the said
gutter and pathway will employ twenty men for three weeks.

Did you ever hear these two excellent _Tory_ lines made by a celebrated
_Whig?_

As bees alighting upon flowerets cease to hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.