should yourself write an introduction _refuting_ the said theory, if you really believe that the thing is worth putting in at all. But let this also pass, for I see the bottom of my paper (by the way I suppose I must not say such a thing in the U.S.), and the chambermaid would fain be dismissed to her bed. At present you may truly say that I am going ahead, for I alone of the suite have arrived, and my master, by being unpunctual, has lost a day of fair wind. At this time FitzGerald wrote to Laurence, the artist: You have, of course, read the account of Spedding's forehead landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good old fellow! I hope he'll come back safe and sound, forehead and all. Not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied, that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead; we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things; you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this. Tennyson's 1842 volume came out while Spedding was at Washington, and FitzGerald, writing to Pollock, regretted that it contained some pieces which he thought better omitted. I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon's honesty may, I am sure, be found there. "The Yankees," Donne writes to Bernard Barton, "seem to think baldness a rarity appertaining to the old country, for their papers could not sufficiently express their wonder, when Ld. Ashburton went over about the Boundary question, at the lack of hair among his attachés. Spedding's crown imperial of a cranium struck them like a view of Teneriffe or Atlas." "Nothing has been heard of Spedding," says FitzGerald, "but we all conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped." The mission ended happily in the treaty of Washington, and Spedding returned to his friends, in spite of the forebodings of FitzGerald, who says: A man on the coach the other day told me that all was being settled very easily in America, but stage-coach politicians are not always to be trusted. By the end of the year (1842), Spedding was again at Mirehouse.