nd largely endowed with mental gifts. He may, or may not,
be correct in this. It is only nature makes the blunder of giving the
sharpest swords the weakest scabbards. What a pity the weapon cannot be
worn naked!

You ask me if I like this place. I do, perhaps, as well as I should
like anywhere. There is a wonderful sameness over the world just now,
preluding, I have very little doubt, some great outburst of nationality
from all the countries of Europe,--just as periods of Puritanism succeed
intervals of gross licentiousness.

Society here is, therefore, what you see it in London or Paris;
well-bred people, like Gold, are current everywhere. There is really
little peculiar to observe. I don't perceive that there is more levity
than elsewhere. The difference is, perhaps, that there is less shame
about it, since it is under the protection of the Church.

I go out very little; my notion is, that the Diplomatist, like the
ancient Augur, must not suffer himself to be vulgarized by contact. He
can only lose, not gain, by that mixed intercourse with the world. I
have a few who come when I want them, and go in like manner. They
tell me "what is going on," far better and more truthfully than paid
employees, and they cannot trace my intentions through my inquiries,
and hasten off to retail them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of my
colleagues I see as little as possible, though, when we do meet, I feel
an unbounded affection for them. So much for my life, dear Harcourt; on
the whole, a very tolerable kind of existence, which if few would envy,
still fewer would care to part with.

I now come to the chief portion of your letter. This boy of Glencore's,
I rather like the account you give of him, better than you do yourself.
Imaginative and dreamy he may be, but remember what he was, and where we
have placed him. A moonstruck, romantic youth at a German University. Is
it not painting the lily?

I merely intended he should go to Goettingen to learn the
language,--always a difficulty, if not abstracted from other and more
dulcet sounds. I never meant to have him domesticated with some rusty
Hochgelehrter, eating sauer-kraut in company with a green-eyed Fraulein,
and imbibing love and metaphysics together. Let him "moon away," as you
call it, my dear Harcourt. It is wonderfully little consequence what any
one does with his intellect till he be three or four and twenty. Indeed,
I half suspect that the soil might be left quietly