Although you agreed this morning to the proposal I made to you, yet, lest I should unintentionally have proposed to you more than I can perform, I think it better more deliberately to explain to you what it is I have to publish.
I have been living at Langenschwalbach and at Schlan-
genbad, two very celebrated bathing places in the mountainous Duchy of Nassau.
The former place alone was visited this season by about two thousand people of
rank or respectability; and the place is, I assure you, known all over Germany,
although even its name has probably never yet reached your ears. I was in these
mountains about three months, and not having a single book to read, I was
obliged to occupy my time in endeavouring to make one.
| BUBBLES FROM THE BRUNNEN. | 359 |
These letters, together with the sketches of the battle of Waterloo, my travelling from Rome with a nun, &c., which you read before I left England, I would embody in a volume which would be as large, or nearly so, as my ‘Rough Notes.’*
If it would suit you to publish this volume, or, in other words, to purchase the MS., I should require for it the sum of two hundred guineas; and the only favour I have to ask of you is, to return me the enclosed letter with your answer, with as little delay as possible; for, as the hunting is about to begin, I do not wish to exist in the piebald capacity of half-huntsman half author; or, in other words, to be half a stag hunter and half a bookseller’s hack.
