“My dear Milman,—Murray has sent me a note of yours which gives very comforting accounts of Mrs. Milman and yourself. Perhaps he has told you why I have been and am here. My son had given me continual distress and anxiety for some time, but lately he fell into a brain fever, and was for some days despaired of. I left Charlotte and Hope in care of him at Norwich (Cha in the Palace—him in the Barracks), and do not know when he may be able to travel with them to Scotland; but when he does, there is left an awful load of care and trouble, and, I fear, embarrassment upon me. He seems to have crammed the folly of a lifetime into less than two years. I do not think I shall get away at all now.
“Murchison has returned ten years younger than he departed, belly gone, wig gone, and lo! a glossy dark chevelure of his own—how he triumphed at my greyness!
| TO MILMAN | 317 |
“Fergusson, too, has returned from Germany, where he and his wife saw all the tokens of a fearful revolutionary civil war, not long to be stayed from explosion all over Vaterland—the rage of class against class fiendish; in the meantime a total stoppage of all trade and the deepest poverty.—Ever yours,
