You are now fairly on your bed of roses,

& Welshmen will look to India as their promised land, even as Scotchmen did in the days of Dundas.

May Wales be as largely benefitted by the wealth of the East as Scotland has been, – & may you live as long as Lord Melville, remain in power longer, – leave it upon better terms, & go out of the world as easily at last.

I was glad to see that Phillimore

“partakes the gale”,

– & should have been glad if Strachey also had been included, if he has any inclination for public life. But probably he has not. It was not fortunate for him that his interests lay in India. He might have acquired an independence in his own country by more congenial pursuits in less time, & have obtained that happiness which is only to be found in domestic life.

You were not in the House when M^r Hume made one of his rascally attacks upon you.

There is something ominous as well as disgraceful to the nation in the sort of hostility with which opposition is now carried on. Honourable warfare is at xxx an end. The difference is no longer upon fair political questions. The A few members aim at the worst end by the worst xxx means; & others assist in those means, some in error, some in malice & some to curry popular favour. Concessions to such enemies are most unwise; they are imputed always to weakness, & provoke insults from those whom it is wished to conciliate. It is equally unwise to let them have the credit of bringing forward measures which are in accord with public fo opinion when that opinion happens to be right. Government should look for opportunities when to lead, – & never suffer itself to be forced.

But I am getting into a strain not altogether decorous, to a Cabinet Minister. Let me therefore speak of my own affairs: – Grosvenor will ask you for thre two or three potential franks to transmit the clean sheets of the Peninsular War, as far as they are printed.

The first volume is very far advanced in the press. I shall have occasion to rewrite some pages upon fuller information which reached me too late, – they <it> relates to the first operations in the South of Spain, & the first communications between Castaños

& the Gov. of Gibralter, Sir Hew Dalrymple.

– There is a besetting sin in our Government of which I have proof among the papers in my possession. – a habit of leaving its foreign agents without instructions, for the sake of shifting off the responsibility. -

It will not be long before I shall send you a farther portion of Oliver Newman,

& when a little more progress is made, it will become an object of some interest to proceed with it to the end, – for the sake of realizing a larger sum than I have ever been master of, & thereby lessening a little (tho but little) the continued necessity of periodical labour.

Gifford wished me to have written a political article at this time. I declined, not for the sake as shrinking from abuse (which some of my acquaintances think me more disposed to provoke than to shun) – but because the agricultural question is one which I do not understand, & what I have to say upon the prospect of the country may better be said in another form – where I can speak with perfect freedom.

– The next number will contain a review of Dobrizhoffer, – the translation of which is the work of my niece Sara Coleridge.

It was undertaken by her younger brother before he went to Cambridge, to facilitate his ways & means there, & she offered to assist him; – this assistance ended in her doing the whole, except a very few sheets.