"'Whitby! Whitby! funny eye! funny eye! two dozen, and let you off easy. Oh you ----!'
"Now, if Madame de B. has a parrot, it had better be taught a French parody of the same sounds.
"With regard to our purposed Journal, I will call it what you please, but it should be a newspaper, to make it _pay_. We can call it 'The Harp,' if you like--or any thing.
"I feel exactly as you do about our 'art[27],'but it comes over me in a kind of rage every now and then, like * * * *, and then, if I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing, which you describe in your friend, I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
"I wish you to think seriously of the Journal scheme--for I am as serious as one can be, in this world, about any thing. As to matters here, they are high and mighty--but not for paper. It is much about the state of things betwixt Cain and Abel. There is, in fact, no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them. Excepting a few occasional murders, (every body killing whomsoever he pleases, and being killed, in turn, by a friend, or relative, of the defunct,) there is as quiet a society and as merry a Carnival as can be met with in a tour through Europe. There is nothing like habit in these things.
"I shall remain here till May or June, and, unless 'honour comes unlocked for,' we may perhaps meet, in France or England, within the year.
"Of course, I cannot explain to you existing circumstances, as they open all letters.
"Will you set me right about your curst 'Champs Elysées?'--are they 'és' or 'ées' for the adjective? I know nothing of French, being all Italian. Though I can read and understand French, I never attempt to speak it; for I hate it. From the second part of the Memoirs cut what you please."
[Footnote 26: Of this gentleman, the following notice occurs in the "Detached Thoughts:"--"L * * was a good man, a clever man, but a bore. My only revenge or consolation used to be setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated bores especially,--Madame de S---- or H----, for example. But I liked L * *; he was a jewel of a man, had he been better set;--I don't mean _personally_, but less _tiresome_, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to every thing and every body. Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in summer, he made me go _before_, to pilot him; I am absent at times, especially towards evening; and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the M * * on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch over which I had passed as usual, forgetting to warn my convoy; once I led him nearly into the river, instead of on the _moveable_ bridge which incommodes passengers; and twice did we both run against the Diligence, which, being heavy and slow, did communicate less damage than it received in its leaders, who were _terra_fied by the charge; thrice did I lose him in the grey of the gloaming, and was obliged to bring-to to his distant signals of distance and distress;--all the time he went on talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words. Poor fellow! he died a martyr to his new riches--of a second visit to Jamaica.