Many thanks, my dear Lady Grey, for your inquiries. Mrs. Sydney is better than she has been for a long time; I have no gout, but am suffering from inflamed eyes, proceeding from much reading and writing. Reading and writing, God knows, to very little use, but resorted to in the country from not knowing what else to do.
I read Guizot’s ‘Washington’ in the summer. Nothing can be better, more succinct, more judicious, more true, more just; but I have done with reviewing. I will write when I have collected some news for you in London. I have read ‘Susan Hopley.’ The incidents are improbable, but the book took me on, and I kept reading it.