Directly that I heard from Wright I wrote to Mowbray Donne to send me just a Post Card--daily, if he or his wife could, with but one or two words on it--"Better," "Less well," or whatever it might be. This morning I hear that all is going on even better than could be expected, according to Miss Spedding. But I suppose the Crisis, which you tell me of, is not yet come; and I have always a terror of that French Adage--"_Monsieur se porte mal--Monsieur se porte mieux--Monsieur est--_" Ah, you know, or you guess, the rest. My dear old Spedding, though I have not seen him these twenty years and more--and probably should never see him again--but he lives--his old Self--in my heart of hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of him--if it could be embellished--for he is but the same that he was from a Boy--all that is best in Heart and Head--a man that would be incredible had one not known him. Again he writes of him to Professor Norton: He was the wisest man I have known; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach America, I mean, of his Death; run over by a Cab and dying in St. George's Hospital to which he was taken, and from which he could not be removed home alive. "I did not know," he says in another letter, "that I should feel Spedding's Loss as I do, after an interval of more than twenty years [since] meeting him. But I knew that I could always get the Word I wanted of him by Letter, and also that from time to time I should meet with some of his wise and delightful Papers in some Quarter or other. He talked of Shakespeare, I am told, when his Mind wandered. I wake almost every morning feeling as if I had lost something, as one does in a Dream; and truly enough, I have lost _him_. 'Matthew is in his Grave, etc.'" In apologizing to Fanny Kemble for not writing to her as usual, he says: