And since I have conversed with those who first returned from France, I have weekly expected the event. Napoleon's object at present is to embarrass the Allies, and to cool the enthusiasm of their subjects. The latter he unfortunately will be too successful in. In London, my Lady, it is scarcely possible to distinguish the opinions of the people from the ravings and railings of the mob; but in country towns we must be blind not to see the real state of the popular mind. I do not know whether your Ladyship read my letters to Judge Fletcher. I can assure you it is no exaggerated picture of the predominance of Jacobinism. In this small town of Calne five hundred volunteers were raised in the last war. I am persuaded that five could not be raised now. A considerable landowner, and a man of great observation, said to me last week, "A famine, sir, could scarce have produced more evil than the Corn Bill[133] has done under the present circumstances." I speak nothing of the Bill itself, except that, after the closest attention and the most sedulous inquiry after facts from landowners, farmers, stewards, millers, and bakers, I am convinced that both opponents and advocates were in extremes, and that an evil produced by many causes was by many remedies to have been cured, not by the universal elixir of one sweeping law.
My poems will be put to press by the middle of June. A number adequate to one volume are already in the hands of my friends at Bristol, under conditions that _they_ are to be published at all events, even though I should not add another volume, which I never had so little reason to doubt. Within the last two days I have composed three poems, containing 500 lines in the whole.
Mr. and Mrs. Morgan present their respective compliments to your Ladyship and Sir George.
I remain, my Lady, your Ladyship's obliged humble servant,
MY HONOURED FRIEND,--On my return from Devizes, whither I had gone to procure some vaccine matter (the small-pox having appeared in Calne, and Mrs. Morgan's sister believing herself never to have had it), I found your letter: and I will answer it immediately, though to answer it as I could wish to do would require more recollection and arrangement of thought than is always to be commanded on the instant. But I dare not trust my own habit of procrastination, and, do what I would, it would be impossible in a single letter to give more than _general_ convictions. But, even after a tenth or twentieth letter, I should still be disquieted as knowing how poor a substitute must letters be for a _vivâ voce_ examination of a work with its author, line by line. It is most uncomfortable from many, many causes, to express anything but sympathy, and gratulation to an absent friend, to whom for the more substantial third of a life we have been habituated to look up: especially where a love, though increased by many and different influences, yet begun and throve and knit its joints in the perception of his superiority. It is not in _written words_, but by the hundred modifications that looks make and tone, and denial of the _full_ sense of the very words used, that one can reconcile the struggle between sincerity and diffidence, between the persuasion that I am in the right, and that as deep though not so vivid conviction, that it may be the positiveness of ignorance rather than the certainty of insight. Then come the human frailties, the dread of giving pain, or exciting suspicions of alteration and dyspathy, in short, the almost inevitable insincerities between imperfect beings, however sincerely attached to each other. It is hard (and I am Protestant enough to doubt whether _it is_ right) to confess the whole truth (even _of_ one's self, human nature scarce endures it, even _to_ one's self), but to me it is still harder to do this of and to a revered friend.