"I had once a valuable friend in the Rev. Mr. Whalley, who took great pains to improve me by his correspondence; he was able at all times to write faster than he could think; from which you probably might be led to surmise that his epistles would have been fuller of news than observations--you would be mistaken; they were essays crammed with trite observations, such as delight in a magazine;--news I never heard from him. If I except _you_, I must own that all my correspondents on your side of the water are very like him. Your letter from Dieppe gave me some useful information, such as might preserve my knee from another _synovia_,[49] or my neck from a crick; and if you took more delight to penetrate my character than to fit me for a trip across the water, in your last, you have at least convinced me that you thought more of _me_ when you wrote, than of _yourself_,--a phenomenon that at once decides your character in my mind, and furnishes me with a master-key for _your_ heart; in any other way you would have found poor Harry 'Too shallow, much too shallow, To sound the bottom of his Jemmy's mind.' "I am, I hope, in the last week of my stay in this paradise of mud, and fricandeaus. God! what additional ecstasies you have lost by your precipitate flight! So many pictures, which would have exercised your critical faculty; the _Apotheosis of St. Petronilla_, by Guercino, in which a colossal dowdy on this side of the grave is transformed to a celestial beauty on the other; the _Fontana d' Amore_, by Titian, a picture which transports you to the plains of Arcadia, or the vale of Enna; the whole-length of Cardinal _Bentivoglio_, by Vandyck--a soul personified--a male soul, I mean: for the mirror of all female spirit, soul, mind, and graces, would have been held up to you by Titian again, in the portrait of _his Mistress_ untwining her ringlets, or, as Petrarch would have called them, her '_Crespe chiome d'or puro lucenti._' "_Madame, dont je baise les mains_, will explain this to you: and so much for what you have lost at the Museum.