After the Coup d’état he writes from here, 7 December 1851, “Well, the President is taking very high ground, and no doubt he will make himself Emperor, if he can keep the Army on his side,” and further on 26 January, “What a scoundrel that President is.” But he went astray in saying that the President would not become Emperor “without a desperate struggle,” and still further astray on 12 October 1851 in generalizing from some undesirables whom he had seen, “America must now be made up of outcasts and rogues of all nations.” In one of his letters--it looks just like the rest--he says on 17 December 1843, “I can scarcely tell if I am not writing plainer and more legibly than usual, as it is by candle, but I fancy so. I am writing with a metal pen. When at Moreton last, I bought some and am much pleased with them, for my sight is so bad that even with the assistance of glasses I cannot make a pen by candle light and very badly by daylight.” Twenty years after that, I was taught to make a pen (that is, to cut a quill into a point) as one of the things that every child must learn. Metal pens did not come into common use until after 1840, though introduced some years before, and many people still despised them. A friend of my father’s writes to him, 13 September 1856, “I hope you will be able to read my letter, but as I write with a steel pen, I am not quite certain of it.” Few people now could write so neatly with a quill; and his writing here is just as neat as ever. Old letters and diaries can be trusted when they are recording facts; but they have never been revised, and may contain opinions which the writers would have modified on second thoughts. My father writes to my sister from Perugia, 17 September 1876, “This is the most curious and romantic place I ever saw: Laon is nothing to it.” Curious and romantic places generally had bad hotels, and Perugia had a good one; and I suspect this made him view the place benignantly and give it this excessive praise. He notes in his diary, 24 August 1874, “Elbe scenery rather fine, tho’ not equal to the Danube, Rhine or Moselle, but better than the Meuse or Loire.” He wrote this at Dresden, just after coming down the Elbe from Schandau; and I imagine he was thinking of the scenery there, forgetting other parts.