I need not describe to you the appearance of London or the manners of the inhabitants in the galleries and institutions with which it abounds, as you have had opportunities of learning better by the use of your own eyes and ears as much about these as you wish to know. Something I might say about the manners and morals of Downing Street which would be new to you, that section of London society having been rarely penetrated by travellers, and if penetrated still more rarely escaped from without the loss of that peculiar faculty by virtue of which man tells truth. But this also I shall at present spare you. Downing Street already lies behind me, and I think it is St. Paul who tells us that we should fix our eyes on what is before, and what, I wonder, is before _me_? I see a fair array of years abounding in capabilities and in leisure to cultivate them, and if I could follow that precept of St. Paul's faithfully, and abstain from looking backwards at an equally fair array of opportunities unimproved and leisure run to waste, I should think the prospect a splendid one.... For these six years past I have been working for other men's purposes, and cultivating my life for their use. Now I set up for myself; and the question is this, of all things which most need to be done what am I best able to do?... But I had forgotten that all this will be a mystery to you who do not know what I have done to myself since I saw you. You must know this that as soon as it was clear which way the elections were going, I wrote to Stephen to say that I meant to leave the C.O., not because the change of parties need make any difference to me, but because my position had already yielded all the good I could expect from it, and a change of administration formed a natural period which it would not be desirable to let pass, the gain of the salary being, in fact, to a person who could live without it, no adequate compensation for the loss of time to a person who could use it in other ways, etc. etc. Stephen thought me quite right, and recommends me to persevere in my present intention of making literature my business: so far at least as to make a fair experiment of it: not doubting that, for a man who has enough to live upon, and who has resolution enough to employ five or six hours every day in reading or writing with some definite practical object, there is no kind of life so eligible: and there is plenty of work to do. So on the 10th of August 1841 (which day I will trouble you, in the memoir of my life which you will prefix to your edition of the fragments of my great work which you will find among my papers at my untimely death, to make for ever memorable) I took my leave of the Colonial Office and recovered possession of my time and my hours at the moderate cost of