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1 Dover Place, Clifton My dear Nicholson, Our correspondence is so slack that I cannot tell what or on what I last wrote, nor where to lay hands on your last. . . . We have had severe weather all this month, and the snow continues all day since last night; but I am happy to say my dear wife is not the worse. . . . I remember vividly the spring of 1836, the first year of our marriage: the season from December to May was the severest that I take note of since the historical winter of 1813 (1812?). This begins to remind me of 1836. . . . I had hoped that continued work at Arabic would explain to me certain fixed difficulties in the documents which I had studied; but a number of them, even where the printed text is quite clear, remain unsolved. I venture to trouble you with the only words which embarrass me in a rather long and complete narrative of the burial of Abd el Mejied and the ceremonial of installing his brother as his successor. If you can translate the line or half-line I shall be benefitted. I finished my Anglo-Arabic dictionary three or four weeks ago, but I hope to enrich and revise it. Perhaps the course of public events surprised you as much as me. As the Whigs cannot afford to be outrun by the Tories, it appeared to me at first that I had been wrong in expecting a tough and lingering struggle. Yet it seems to me, in revising details, morally impossible for either Tories or a Russell Ministry to do enough to stop and satisfy the outdoors Reform movement. If Russell would retire, or were forced to retire, and Gladstone had courage and resolution to make a Radical Ministry, including Bright and Mill, Stansfeld, Forster, Milnes, Gibson, etc. (to which the Duke of Argyle would adhere), and were to dissolve Parliament if necessary—even so it would be hard to pass through the Lords a measure adequate to stop the clamour for more, and active agitation. I begin to relapse into my belief that there must be long conflict. Nothing seems to me worth a national Convulsion which does not give us new principles and new persons in the Executive Government. I incline to believe that we shall live to see Radicalism (of a grade far beyond what is popularly so named) in high office and carrying out its principles with energy.
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