Of his work he wrote,--"Well, I go on in the office, _operose nihil agenda_, very _operose_, and very _nihil_ too. For lack of news, I send you a specimen of my labors."--"We are here going on much as usual, --occupied with nothing else but commerce and the money-market. I do not think any one is thinking audibly of anything else."--"I have read with more pleasure than anything else that I have read lately Kane's Arctic Explorations, i.e., his second voyage, which is certainly a wonderful story. The whole narrative is, I think, very characteristic of the differences between the English and the American-English habits of command and obedience." In the autumn of 1857, after speaking of some of the features of the Sepoy revolt, he said,--"I don't believe Christianity can spread far in Asia, unless it will allow men more than one wife,--which isn't likely yet out of Utah. But I believe the old Brahmin 'Touch not and taste not, and I am holier than thou, because I don't touch and taste,' may be got rid of. As for Mahometanism, it is a crystallized monotheism, out of which no vegetation can come. I doubt its being good even for the Central negro." March, 1859. "Excuse this letter all about my own concerns. I am pretty busy, and have time for little else: such is our fate after forty. My figure 40 stands nearly three months behind me on the roadway, unwept, unhonored, and unsung, an _octavum lustrum_ bound up and laid on the shelf. 'So-and-so is dead,' said a friend to Lord Melbourne of some author. 'Dear me, how glad I am! Now I can bind him up.'"