The only objection I descry is purely one of feeling. Pauline trotting about in front of the float, invoking the orchestra with a limp pocket-handkerchief, is a notion that makes goose-flesh of my back. Also a yelping tenor going away to the wars in a scene a half-an-hour long is painful to contemplate. Damas, too, as a bass, with a grizzled bald head, blatently bellowing about Years long ago, When the sound of the drum First made his blood glow With a rum ti tum tum-- rather sticks in my throat; but there really seems to me to be no other objection, if you can get over this. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Baylis.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, First February, 1862._ MY DEAR MR. BAYLIS, I have just come home. Finding your note, I write to you at once, or you might do me the wrong of supposing me unmindful of it and you. I agree with you about Smith himself, and I don't think it necessary to pursue the painful subject. Such things are at an end, I think, for the time being;--fell to the ground with the poor man at Cremorne. If they should be resumed, then they must be attacked; but I hope the fashion (far too much encouraged in its Blondin-beginning by those who should know much better) is over. It always appears to me that the common people have an excuse in their patronage of such exhibitions which people above them in condition have not. Their lives are full of physical difficulties, and they like to see such difficulties overcome. They go to see them overcome. If I am in danger of falling off a scaffold or a ladder any day, the man who claims that he can't fall from anything is a very wonderful and agreeable person to me. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] 16, HYDE PARK GATE, SOUTH KENSINGTON GORE, W., _Saturday, 1st March, 1862._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, I was at your lecture[73] this afternoon, and I hope I may venture to tell you that I was extremely pleased and interested. Both the matter of the materials and the manner of their arrangement were quite admirable, and a modesty and complete absence of any kind of affectation pervaded the whole discourse, which was quite an example to the many whom it concerns. If you could be a very little louder, and would never let a sentence go for the thousandth part of an instant until the last word is out, you would find the audience more responsive.