"How is your gout? or rather, how are you? I return the Count ----'s Journal, which is a very extraordinary production[1], and of a most melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England. I know, or knew personally, most of the personages and societies which he describes; and after reading his remarks, have the sensation fresh upon me as if I had seen them yesterday. I would however plead in behalf of some few exceptions, which I will mention by and by. The most singular thing is, _how_ he should have penetrated _not_ the _fact_, but the _mystery_ of the English ennui, at two-and-twenty. I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles,--(for there is scarcely a person mentioned whom I did not see nightly or daily, and was acquainted more or less intimately with most of them,)--but I never could have described it so well. _Il faut etre Francais_, to effect this. [Footnote 1: In another letter to Lord B---- he says of this gentleman, "he seems to have all the qualities requisite to have figured in his brother-in-law's ancestor's Memoirs."] "But he ought also to have been in the country during the hunting season, with 'a select party of distinguished guests,' as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soiree ensuing thereupon,--and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord C----'s--small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people. The dessert was hardly on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted _five asleep_; of that five, there were _Tierney_, Lord ----, and Lord ---- --I forget the other two, but they were either wits or orators--perhaps poets. "My residence in the East and in Italy has made me somewhat indulgent of the siesta;--but then they set regularly about it in warm countries, and perform it in solitude (or at most in a tete-a-tete with a proper companion), and retire quietly to their rooms to get out of the sun's way for an hour or two.