My dear Nicholson,

        A Happy New Year to you all! We are here, in the same lodgings as a year ago, having begun and ended the year in them. We have begun this year with hopes for the future brightly contrasted to anything for ten years back. For this, among men, I thank, first of all, Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, and secondly, Louis Napoleon. The hatred which the last incurs with the Austrian party and the Ultramontanists is, I think, a fair measure of his services and tendencies.

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        I cannot get any solution from any of my books of certain difficulties in the Arabic phraseology of Robinson Crusoe, and I want to ask your help; but I do not like to do so until I learn that it would not encroach too much on your leisure.

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        We have been here reading aloud Mrs. Beecher Stowe's new tale, The Minister's Wooing, with very great pleasure. I regard her as a real "prophetess," and am delighted at the enormous circulation of her works. I have been stimulated to try my hand at translating into Latin five of the most eloquent passages in the book, as a trial of the possibility of putting such things into that language. I am pleased with the result, although it is clear to me that without a development of the Latin vocabulary far beyond Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, and Seneca no one could ever be fluent and free to speak on modern subjects. One has to paraphrase and go round instead of speaking outright. I am thinking I ought to know something more about Arnobius and Lactantius, and see what sort of development they effected; and the resolution rises in my mind that I will look to this, being hitherto quite ignorant of them. . . . I suppose the "Volunteer Rifles" are talked of at Penrith as elsewhere. I regard it as a breach of faith to transform these Volunteers into Light Infantry, which seems to be the darling idea of military men.