the final tag rags of Printer people off me;--"surely within
three weeks now!" I say to myself. But I shall be back, too, if
all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will
stand to her point, I hope.

That book on Friedrich of Prussia--first half of it, two swoln
unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his Father, &c., and
leave him at his accession--is just getting out of my hands. One
packet more of Proofs, and I have done with it,--thanks to all
the gods! No job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out
for me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad negative
one, "Shall we be beaten in our old days, then?"--But it has
thoroughly humbled me,--trampled me down into the _mud,_ there to
wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of Mankind, German,
English, French, and other, for _all_ have borne a hand in these
sad centuries;--and here I emerge at last, not _killed,_ but
almost as good. Seek not to look at the Book,--nay in fact it is
"not to be _published_ till September" (so the man of affairs
settles with me yesterday, "owing to the political &c., to the
season," &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days I should
be utterly out of it,--not to hear of it again till the Day of
Judgment, and if possible not even then! In fact it is a bad
book, poor, misshapen, feeble, _nearly_ worthless (thanks to
_past_ generations and to me); and my one excuse is, I could not
make it better, all the world having played such a game with it.
Well, well!--How true is that you say about the skater; and the
rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et
ceteras! Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these
late operations; never in any so much. And in short the
business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me;
and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to
write,--unless sheer Fate force him to do it;--and then he ought
(if _not_ of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather.
That is deliberately my opinion,--or far nearer it than you
will believe.

Once or twice I caught some tone of you in some American
Magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the
only thing that is _speech_ at all among my fellow-creatures in
this time. For the years that remain, I suppose we must continue
to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind: what can
we do, at this late stage? But in the _real_ "Model Republic,"
it would have