“Dear Lockhart,—Here are your Session Papers again, with many thanks to the Lord Peter and you. I had heard of Jeffrey’s opinion on the same question, but do not find it here; perhaps he sits in some other ‘Division,’ under some other kind of wig. May the Lord help them all—and us all!
“There will be required, I perceive, a very great
deal more palaver before they get a real English Poor-Law passed for Scotland;
but to that conclusion, if they should paint an inch thick, they will be
obliged to come;—and even that (God knows!) will not stead them very
long. Palaver has been loud very long; but Fact, in these times, is getting
still louder—loud as Cavaignac’s cannon and the thunder of the
gods! I confess I am not sorry that this brutish dog-kennel is either to be cut
off altogether or made more human a little. Was not Peel’s prophecy, the other week, a kind of gleam as of
something like a dawn that would get above
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“You will never more come to Chelsea; and at Sussex Place it is useless for me to call—yet I will once again before long, in spite of the grim Fates. If you are in bed or abroad, your blood be on your own head!
“Good be with you at any rate; I do salute you across the Arctic seas and their ice-floes; and am always, dear Lockhart, yours sincerely,
