“I am greatly gratified that you have seen John Maxwell--whose visit I look for with much pleasure. We have not met for seventeen years,--up to that we had spent, nearly day-by-day, the previous ten or twelve years always together. It will be curious for each to see time’s changes in the other, and how far the opinions and tastes of the man already steering round Cape Dangerous have diverged from (those of) the boy and the youth. For myself, there are many [? changes] that I can recognise; nor am I blind to the telling of coming years, which show me the diminished sense of enjoyment I possess to heretofore,--how little I value society, how tiresome I find what I hear are very pleasant people, and so on. And without being actually old, I am old enough to think that the world used to be pleasanter long ago, and that friends were more cordial and more frank, and that there was more _laisser-aller_ in the course of life than in these hardworking, money-seeking, railroading days we’ve got now.
“The most enduring tastes a man can cultivate (avarice apart) are, I believe, the love of scenery and music. There I feel stronger than ever: the former has, perhaps from living a good deal alone, become a passion with me, and I am better pleased to have glens, glaciers, and cataracts than the fascinations of soirees and receptions.
“Keep ‘Horace Templeton’ quite _en cachet_, for though I suppose I shall be known easily, I will not confess, but die innocent.
“We have very grave events happening here at Milan, but they are kept quiet by the police, and even in society every one you ask on the subject says--_Non e niente_: and so they will keep on saying till the streets are barricaded, and the city in open revolt. Between ourselves, the reform party here are great blackguards, and the Pope [? without irreverence] an ass to think that moderate concessions and reasonable privileges will content a mob, who only look for a new constitution as an occasion for general pillage. It’s all very fine for ‘the gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease,’ to say God-speed to the march of Liberal opinions in other lands; but let them remember that our own institutions took centuries to grow and to consolidate, and were often shaken and menaced, and only at length firmly established by the force of public opinion, which finds its exponent in aristocratic institutions,--a hereditary peerage and a popular assembly, nearly four-fifths of which is aristocratic. Try the same systems in other countries, and see what will come of it. Get people to make laws who never met for the voting of a parish cess or a penny poor rate; liberate a press that only asks freedom that it may revel in libel; set up an aristocracy that are uneducated and unreformed as objects of general respect! No, no! If the Pope had contented himself with his first [? effort], and swept the Church and its monastic institutions free from abuses; had he examined into the state of charities and hospitals and schools,--he would have done far more good, though far less obtrusively, than by quarrelling with Austria, and fraternising with Mazzini & Co.