April 16/46

    My dear Nicholson,

        I have sent one or two "Leagues" of late to my brother-in-law in Devonshire, thinking that they had in them matter of instruction to him. . . . Does not Peel appear of late to have made himself as little as of old? Yet I rejoice in his obstructing a mere Whig ministry of the orthodox kind; and although his course has heaped misery on Ireland, nothing less severe, I imagine, would brace England up to the stringent remedies which alone can save that country;—nor are we yet screwed to the point! . . .

        I have finished the Berber MS. as far as the Arabic had been translated, viz. twenty-eight folio pages: four more remain, of which I cannot understand either the Berber or the Arabic. I suppose neither could Mr. Hodgson understand them; for while he professes to have translated the whole of the Arabic, he has quietly omitted these. I naturally turn myself to your aid. I have quite ascertained that the Arabic and Berber do correspond. . . .

        I am trying to move my house, i.e. to get into a new shell, further from the smoke. Edward Sterling's little brother, aged five and a half, is now with us; and especially for his sake I desire to have pure air. . . . I am sorry to say she[*] is becoming more and more afflicted with rheumatism. I am about to send her to Malvern, where one of her sisters now is, to try a hydropathist physician there—a regularly educated man. As she must take little Johnny S. and her own maid, and another to help in bathings, and look after the child, it is quite a nomad eruption and waggon-load of Scythians.

        My sister's child, a boy of Johnny S.'s age, fell into the fire six or seven weeks ago, and was almost burnt to death. The poor little fellow endured agonies, but is at last nearly recovered. . . . It seems a wonderful recovery.

    [*Mrs. Newman.]