"I felt very warmly the kindness of your letter which congratulated me on my remarriage, and I have often desired to write to you that you might feel how unchanged is my regard for you, though circumstances do not at all carry me so far north as your dwelling. I may briefly add, that a year's experience quite justifies my expectation. The marriage was not in my estimate an experiment, which might succeed or fail.... That my wife's health is not robust, I certainly grieve, but she is nineteen years my junior. Our love and trust has only increased month by month.... This black edge" (of the note paper) "is for my only surviving sister, whose death is just announced to me. She was my fondest object of boyish love, and it is impossible not to grieve. On the other hand, I had long expected it, and did not at all think she would survive _last_ winter.... I believe she was loved and respected by _everyone_ who knew her, as truly she deserved to be. I feel good consolation in this.... For three years our public doings have been to me so mournful and dreadful--with no power anywhere to stay the madness of the Court and Ministry,--that I have been made unwilling to write about them. Retribution for such deeds seemed to me certain, inevitable: it seems to be coming more speedily than I had expected. Stormy controversies must in any case be here encountered. But ever since 1856 (I might date from the day when Lord Dalhousie went to India--1848?) we seem to have been storing up wrath and vengeance against ourselves,--worse and worse at home as well as abroad, since the death of Peel. I never admired Peel: he had to trim to the Tories: but I now see how moderate Peel kept them, and in comparison how wise Peel was. "So many are the eminently good men and women in England that I am certain we must have a nobler future: but that may be separated from the present time by a terrible struggle.... "I am your affectionate friend, "F. W. Newman."