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 better than a tent, and that a house is the greatest luxury in the world.

We are in a sad way for new books; the last box that came out has, by some mistake, slipped by all the postmasters, and is jogging on at the rate of ten miles a day to Simla, and will have to come back at the same pace. In the meanwhile I have read over the old ones till I should know them by heart if my memory were not gone. I do not think you ever sufficiently appreciated that large edition of St.-Simon in twenty-two volumes. I make it a regular study—a sort of French Boswell, with an occasional touch of Shakespeare in a few court scenes—and am reading it through for about the fourth time. I wish you, who are a French authority, would send me word whether it is not peculiar to him to call a digression, or a long story, or a tiresome sentence une bourre, the evident derivation of our bore. I always wonder why we talk of such a thing being a bore—not at the sentiment. A dumb man marching would be driven into saying ‘What a bore,’ but at the expression. I do think St.-Simon’s account of the court after the death of the first Dauphin is worth any money. I wish I had not read it yesterday;