London, 23 April 1857 
9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, 
Haverstock Hill 

Dear Fred, 

I shall write to Dana not later than tomorrow. For me, the thing 
has come as a godsend, as you can imagine. It has also reassured 
my wife, which is important in her present situation. | shall write 
to Steffen straight away (the fellow has changed his lodgings 
without notifying me, but is still in Brighton). Pieper, as you will 
remember from one of my _ previous letters,” has been a 
schoolmaster in Bognor since Christmas, and I shall CERTAINLY LEAVE 
Him THERE. He was becoming daily more vacuous, idle, useless and 
expensive. Under the iron rod of the parson in whose service he 
now is, he will again come to his senses. Moreover, the laddie left 
me just at a time when, because of my wife’s condition, he thought 
himself indispensable and did not seem averse to the idea of my 

a See this volume, p. 98. 

pressing him to remain on more favourable terms. [ pm Nothing oF 
THE sort but merely expressed my satisfaction at his having at long 
last found a post. In the event, it transpired that his ‘indispensabil- 
ity’ was merely a figment of his own imagination. My wife fulfils 
the function of secretary without all the bother created by the 
noble youth. As tutor to the girls he was quite unsuitable. So both 
parties have benefited from the change and, if the fellow again 
becomes serviceable, as I am convinced he will, he'll be much 
fortified by the realisation that I do not need him in any way. 

Hence there can be no question of setting up an office in 
London. There is no one here who is any good. It’s possible—and 
this I shall know within a day or two—that Dana has approached 
Freiligrath direct. Our Freiligrath is again MALCONTENT with his post 
though it enables him to earn £300 very comfortably with little or 
nothing to do. What he finds tedious is, for one thing, the 
moaning and groaning of the shareholders, who vent their 
displeasure on him, and, for another, his admittedly ambiguous 
position, which places’ a great deal of responsibility on him while 
allowing him barely a semblance of autonomy. That, aT Least, is the 
interpretation he himself puts on his FeeLincs. What in fact LurKs 
beneath all this is, or so it seems to me, a general distaste for 
responsibility, A clerical post which would relieve him of it, as at 
Hood’s, is and always will be his dream. Then, too, he is 
tormented by the conflict between his renown as a poet and the 
rate of exchange. So far as 1 can gather from his occasional 
confessions, all these Crédits mobiliers are privily assailed by 
considerable miscivincs. He was assured by an old hand on the 
Stock Exchange that never, in a practice of 40 years standing, had 
he experienced a chronic state of crisis such as now prevails. I 
haven’t yet got round to it, but some time I must really investigate 
the relationship between the rate of exchange and cotton, The 
role played by money as such in determining the bank rate and 
the MONEY MARKET IS SOMETHING STRIKING AND QUITE ANTAGONISTIC TO ALL LAWS OF 
POLITICAL Economy. Worthy of note are the 2 newly published 
volumes of Tooke’s History of Prices. A pity the old man’s head-on 
collision with the currency principle chaps '*” should lead him to give 
such a one-sided turn to all his disquisitions. 

I wrote to Dana as much as a fortnight ago asking for the 
return of your Bazancourt.” 

The Urquhartites—who have asked me to send them a detailed 
bill—have paid me £10 on account’; this was most welcome, since 

a See this volume, p. 120. 

I owed that much to baker and butcher alone. The girls are 
growing up very quickly and their education, too, is becoming 
expensive. At the Lapres seminary they frequent, they are having 
PRIVATE LESSONS with an Italian, a Frenchman and a DRAWING MASTER. 
Now I have also got to find a chap for music. They learn 
extraordinarily fast. The youngest one—the sasy*——is an astonish- 
ingly witty little thing and claims that sHE HAs GOT Two BRAINS. 

For my own part I would much prefer to supply Dana with 
articles on, say, Ricardo, Sismondi, etc. That sort of thing does at 
least admit of objective treatment from the Yankee point of view. 
German philosophy is difficult to write about in English. However, 
I shall suggest various things to Dana and leave the choice to him. 

For the past six months I’ve been constantly having to call in the 
doctor for my wife. She is, indeed, very much run down. 

Apropos. *Dr Freund has passed through the court of 
bankruptcy—assets £200, debts £3,000.* 

The Bright and Cobden party cannot help but thrive now that 
Faucher is the foreign editor of their London paper, The Morning 
Star. ’'m now on speaking terms with the chap since I can’t help 
encountering him sometimes at Edgar Bauer’s. The man considers 
himself the finest fellow in the world. ‘Bruno Bauer has lost his 
self-confidence. He feels that it is I, not he, who will conquer 
Prussia.’ He is A CURIOUS FREETRADER TOO, who doesn’t even know what 
the MIDDLE classes are. Prussia is, and ought to be, ruled by ‘the 
officer and the student’, ‘I bowl over any English meeting at which 
I speak’, ‘I have made history. It was I who drew up Cobden’s 
Canton motion’, to cite only a few of his tropes. The chap’s a 
veritable Munchausen of mendacity, a veritable Ancient Pistol” of 
braggadocio, and once in 6 months it’s amusing to listen to his 
boasting. 

Have you—or Lupus—heard anything about a Rémische Ges- 
chichte published somewhere near Heidelberg, which is said to 
contain much that is new‘? 

How goes it with the landlord of the Golden Lion? 

Salut. Your 

K. M.