up to high-water mark and the year's income anticipated is not the
very most delightful prospect possible.

"The crows are very fat and very plenty. They sit on the roadside
and look at you with a kind of right of property. There are no
beggars--at least, professional ones. They were all starved-dead,
gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found
for them. There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two
divisions of Kingdom Come. I see in The Spectator the undergraduates
were energetically loyal at Commemoration--nice boys--and the dons
have been snubbed about Guizot. Is there a chance for M---? Poor
fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose
humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn't. My
wedding party have not arrived. It is impossible not to feel a
kindly interest in them. At the bottom of all the agitation a
wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of
misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is
picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous
jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at
concealing it. Well, good-bye. I hardly know when I look over
these pages whether to wish you to get them or not.

"Yours notwithstanding,
"J.A.F."

Ireland had been devastated, far more than decimated, by the famine,
and was simmering with insurrection, like the Continent of Europe.
The Corn Laws had gone, and the Whigs were back in office, but they
could do nothing with Ireland. To Froude it appeared as if the
disturbed state of the country were an emblem of distracted Churches