"After working at Barnaby all day, and wandering about the most wretched and distressful streets for a couple of hours in the evening--searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon--I went at it, at about ten o'clock. To say that the reading that most astonishing and tremendous account has constituted an epoch in my life--that I shall never forget the lightest word of it--that I cannot throw the impression aside, and never saw anything so real, so touching, and so actually present before my eyes, is nothing. I am husband and wife, dead man and living woman, Emma and General Dundas, doctor and bedstead--everything and everybody (but the Prussian officer--damn him) all in one. What I have always looked upon as masterpieces of powerful and affecting description, seem as nothing in my eyes. If I live for fifty years, I shall dream of it every now and then, from this hour to the day of my death, with the most frightful reality. The slightest mention of a battle will bring the whole thing before me. I shall never think of the Duke any more but as he stood in his shirt with the officer in full-dress uniform, or as he dismounted from his horse when the gallant man was struck down. It is a striking proof of the power of that most extraordinary man, Defoe, that I seem to recognise in every line of the narrative something of him. Has this occurred to you? The going to Waterloo with that unconsciousness of everything in the road, but the obstacles to getting on--the shutting herself up in her room and determining not to hear--the not going to the door when the knocking came--the finding out by her wild spirits when she heard he was safe, how much she had feared when in doubt and anxiety--the desperate desire to move towards him--the whole description of the cottage, and its condition; and their daily shifts and contrivances, and the lying down beside him in the bed and both _falling asleep_; and his resolving not to serve any more, but to live quietly thenceforth; and her sorrow when she saw him eating with an appetite, so soon before his death; and his death itself--all these are matters of truth, which only that astonishing creature, I think, could have told in fiction.