"Altogether, your friend's Journal is a very formidable production. Alas! our dearly beloved countrymen have only discovered that they are tired, and not that they are tiresome; and I suspect that the communication of the latter unpleasant verity will not be better received than truths usually are. I have read the whole with great attention and instruction. I am too good a patriot to say _pleasure_--at least I won't say so, whatever I may think. I showed it (I hope no breach of confidence) to a young Italian lady of rank, _tres instruite_ also; and who passes, or passed, for being one of the three most celebrated belles in the district of Italy, where her family and connections resided in less troublesome times as to politics, (which is not Genoa, by the way,) and she was delighted with it, and says that she has derived a better notion of English society from it than from all Madame de Stael's metaphysical disputations on the same subject, in her work on the Revolution. I beg that you will thank the young philosopher, and make my compliments to Lady B. and her sister. "Believe me your very obliged and faithful "N. B. "P.S. There is a rumour in letters of some disturbance or complot in the French Pyrenean army--generals suspected or dismissed, and ministers of war travelling to see what's the matter. 'Marry (as David says), this hath an angry favour.' "Tell Count ---- that some of the names are not quite intelligible, especially of the clubs; he speaks of _Watts_--perhaps he is right, but in my time _Watiers_ was the Dandy Club, of which (though no dandy) I was a member, at the time too of its greatest glory, when Brummell and Mildmay, Alvanley and Pierrepoint, gave the Dandy Balls; and we (the club, that is,) got up the famous masquerade at Burlington House and Garden, for Wellington. He does not speak of the _Alfred_, which was the most _recherche_ and most tiresome of any, as I know by being a member of that too." LETTER 513. TO THE EARL OF B----. "April 6. 1823. "It _would_ be worse than idle, knowing, as I do, the utter worthlessness of words on such occasions, in me to attempt to express what I ought to feel, and do feel for the loss you have sustained[1]; and I must thus dismiss the subject, for I dare not trust myself further with it _for your_ sake, or for my own. I shall _endeavour_ to see you as soon as it may not appear intrusive. Pray excuse the levity of my yesterday's scrawl--I little thought under what circumstances it would find you. [Footnote 1: The death of Lord B----'s son, which had been long expected, but of which the account had just then arrived.]