at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.
Friends' company is the thing.

To A FRIEND

_Offence and punishment_

Wimbledon, 11 and 12 _August_, 1846.

... I find I made a great confusion of my _portion_ of the legal
expenses incurred by the _Examiner_, with the _whole_ of them. That
portion only amounted to L750, the whole being L1500. Of this L750 out
of my pocket (which was quite enough), L250 went to pay for
expenses (counsel, &c.) attendant on the _failure_ of two Government
prosecutions,--one for saying (_totidem verbis_) that 'of all monarchs
since the Revolution, the successor of George III would have the
finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular'; (think, nowadays,
of being prosecuted for _that_!) and the other for copying from the
_Stamford News_ the paragraph against military flogging, alluded to
the other day in the _Daily News_. (Think, now, this moment, of being
prosecuted for _That_!) The L500 fine and two years' imprisonment was
for ludicrously contrasting the _Morning Post's_ picture of the Regent
as an 'Adonis', &c. with the old and real fat state of the case, and
for adding that his Royal Highness had lived for 'upwards of half
a century without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his
contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity'. Words to that effect,
and I believe better,--but I do not quite remember them. They might be
easily ascertained by reference to Peel's Coffee-house, and the words
of the _Post_, too.

Besides the fine, my imprisonment cost me several hundred pounds (I
can't exactly say how many) in monstrous _douceurs_ to the gaoler
for _liberty to walk in the garden_, for help towards getting me
permission to fit up rooms in the sick hospital, and for fitting
up said rooms, or rather converting them from sorts of
washhouses, hitherto uninhabited and unfloored, into comfortable
apartments,--which I did too expensively,--at least as far as papering
the sitting-room with a trellis of roses went, and having my ceiling
painted to imitate an out-of-door sky. No notice, however, could
be taken, I suppose, of any of _this_ portion of the expenses,
governments having nothing to do with the secret corruptions of
gaolers or the pastorals of incarcerated poets: otherwise the
prosecutions cost me altogether a good bit beyond a thousand pounds.

But perhaps it might be mentioned that I went to prison from all but
a sick bed, having been just ordered by the physician _to go to the