During 1863 Panizzi repeated his visit to Biarritz, and his Italian friends urged him to see the Emperor Napoleon, and to cultivate that potentate’s friendship. With reference to their arguments, he thus wrote to Mr Ellice: ‘I am urged by Lacaita and Pasolini to go, who think I may do some good, _which I do not hope in the least_.’ However, he went; but on the 15th of October, 1863, he wrote to Mrs Haywood: ‘I have been abroad on a visit to the Emperor and the Empress of the French, with whom I spent four weeks. I might have remained a little longer, but on receiving the news of the death of Mr. Ellice, the greatest friend I had lost since I lost one (Mr. Haywood) still more dear to me, and to whom I owed more, I hasten back to England.... My rheumatic pains have become more violent, and curiously, or rather unfortunately enough, my right wrist is more affected than my other joints, which renders my writing always difficult and painful—at times impossible. As you may conceive, as writing is what I must do, this distresses me greatly. At night, too, I suffer particularly, and am kept from sleeping, so that in the daytime I cannot work as energetically as I used to do, and as is required of one who fills my place. I have often thought of resigning, but the Trustees won’t hear of it, and flatter me by saying I am absolutely necessary to the Museum, which I do not think!’ In fact Panizzi, with all his conscientious care of himself, that he might still be fit for office, had never succeeded in rooting out the seeds of that illness from which he suffered so much in 1862. The same exhausting sleeplessness at night wore him out, and every symptom of disease seemed aggravated. How acute were his sufferings the biographer well remembers, and how, notwithstanding all, he never relaxed the undeviating regularity of his attendance to official duties. [Illustration]