God bless Mr. King! My dear Lucy, we have the best hopes now that your
admirable patience and fortitude will be rewarded, and soon. We
regretted the three-quarters of an hour Mr. King might have spent with
you which were wasted at the coach office, but these are among the
_minnikin_ miseries of human life. You must often wonder how people in
health, and out of pain, and with the use of their limbs and all their
locomotive faculties, can complain of anything. But man is a grumbling
animal, not woman.

We are reading Madame de Stael's _Dix Annees d'Exil_ with delight.
Though there may be too much egotism, yet it is extremely interesting;
and though she repeats too often, and uses too many words, yet there are
so many brilliant passages, and things which no one but herself could
have thought or said, that it will last as long as the memory of
Buonaparte lasts on earth. Pray get it and read it; not the plays or
poetry which make up the last volume--why will _friends_ publish all the
trash they can scrape together of celebrated people?

Mr. Hales, my dry diplomatist, tells me that Madame de Stael, he was
assured by the Swedish minister, provoked Buonaparte, by intriguing to
set Bernadotte on the throne of France, and that letters of hers on this
subject were intercepted. You will not care much about this, but you may
tell it to some of your visitants, who will be in due time as full of
Madame de Stael's _Dix Annees d'Exil_ as I am at this moment.

Here is an old distich which my dry diplomatist came out with yesterday
at dinner, on the ancestor of Hampden. The remains of the Hampden estate
are in this neighbourhood, and as we were speaking of our wish to see
the place in which the patriot lived, Mr. Hales observed that it is