But an English hotel is a cure for most of the sorrows of English life. The well-served table--the excellent sherry--a blazing fire, not at all unrequired in the first sharp evenings of our autumn--and the newspaper "just come in," are capital "medicines for the mind diseased." And like old Maréchal Louvois, who recommended roast pigeons as a cure for grief--observing that, "whenever he heard of the loss of any of his friends, he ordered a pair, and found himself always much comforted after eating them"--I was beginning to sink into that easy oblivion of the rules of life, which, without actual sleep, has all the placid enjoyment of slumber; when a voice pronounced my name, and I was startled and half suffocated by the embrace of a figure who rushed from an opposite box, and in a torrent of French poured out a torrent of raptures on my arriving in London. When I contrived at last to disengage myself, I saw Lafontaine; but so hollow-cheeked and pale-visaged, that I could scarcely recognize my showy friend in the skeleton knight who stood gesticulating his ultra-happiness before me. At length he drew, with a trembling touch and a glistening eye, from his bosom a letter, which he placed in my hand with a squeeze of eternal friendship. "Read," said he, "read, and then wonder, if you can, at my misery and my gratitude." The letter was from Mariamne, and certainly a very pretty one--gay and tender at once; gracefully alluding to some little fretfulness on her part, or his, I could scarcely tell which; but assuring him that all this was at an end--that she foreswore the world henceforth, and was quite his own. All this was expressed with an elegance which I was not quite prepared to find in the fair one, and with a tone of sincerity for which I was still less prepared; yet with the coquette in every line. I should have been glad to see him at any time, but now I received him as a resource from solitude, or rather from those restless thoughts which made solitude so painful to me. Another bottle, perhaps, made me more sensitive, and him more willing to communicate; and before it was finished, he had opened his whole heart and emptied his letter-case, and I had consulted him on the _im_probabilities of my ever being able to succeed in the object which had so strangely, yet so totally, occupied all my feelings.