gging, and Charles Greville has written to E---- again to
come over and stand.... I disapprove of this incessant urging E---- to
return, especially as the Grevilles only want him to become a British
legislator in order that she may open a pleasant house in London and
amuse them....

You ask me what I shall do with regard to America. If I act there, I
shall do so upon the plan I started with here; _i.e._, a nightly
certainty, to be paid nightly: it is what the managers send to offer me,
and is, without doubt, the safest, if not the most profitable plan....

I am diverted with your rage at Liston [the eminent surgeon under whose
care I had been]. I must say, I wish he had been a little more attentive
to me professionally....

My singing neighbors--I suppose lodgers for the season--have departed,
or, at any rate, become silent; I hear them no more, and make all my own
music, which I prefer, though sometimes of an evening, when I am not
singing, the lonely silence round me is rather oppressive. But my
evenings are short; I dine at seven, and go to bed at ten; and in spite
of my endeavors to achieve a better frame of mind, I do look with
positive joy at my bed, where, lying down, the day will not only be
past, but forgotten.... It is difficult for me not to rejoice when each
day ends....

Dear Hal, I dined with the Horace Wilsons, and in the evening my father
came there. He said Miss Cottin, with whom he was to have dined, was
ill, and had put him off; that he had only come up from Brighton the day
before, and was going back to-morrow--to-day, _i.e._; that he was not
well, but that Brighton agreed with him, and that he should steam about
from Brighton to Havre and Dieppe and Guernsey and Jersey, as that
process suits him better than abiding on dry land....

ORCHARD STREET, Thursday, June 10th.

Of course, dear Harriet, I know that the officials of our public
charities cannot be thrown into paroxysms of pity by every case of
misery brought before them; they would soon cease to be relieving
officers, and have to be relieved themselves. But "there is reason in
roasting of eggs," whatever that may mean: our forefathers knew, and so
did Touchstone, for he talks of "an ill-roasted egg, done all o' one
side." I assure you when I went to the workhouse to see after that
wretched young girl who was taken up for sleeping in the park because
she had nowhere else to sleep in, though I cried like