Febry. 27, 1858.

Your letter of the 19th. has just come, & is one of the nicest of the many you have written since I {86} left England. I shall sit down and answer it at once, & this time I won’t be hirritated if I can help it. I vex myself often after I send off hastily written letters. However, you are so very just as well as kind in weighing my ways and doings, that I am not afraid of having vexed you much. In this infernal hole of a place, so little novelty occurs that some small worry constantly friddles ones temper. You aint “red tape” and you can’t help the state of things: whereby I recant my osbervations.

I am sorry you were so beastly unwell, not but that a good routing may do good, and still more sorry about Mrs. Urquhart’s child.1

I shall write to you from Jerusalem, & to Lady W. as soon as I have returned from Masada: — It was Miss Dennett who wrote that:2 I knew you would like it — you do not say you have seen her, Lady W. since your return. Tell her I shall take great pains about her views, if she asks about my going. I think her Sunset must be from Scopus. (Bye the bye, I have been reading a good deal, my old teacher being quite knocked up, so that I have had but 2 months of Greek lessons out of the last 12. — Finlay’s 5 volumes of Greece are admirable. Try to get Gambinis pamphlet on the Jews. I have {87} just read Paul Ferrol a very nasty odious book. Lady Buller lent it to me. She is a very nice woman, I dined there two days ago for the first time, and was really pleased. Everyone seems to like her. As for Lady Y. she has been a flouncing off to Egina with the K[ing] of G[reece] & the whole Palace party are not yet returned.

I shall long to hear from you in the Holy Land. Clowes3 has written but does not come: — & so I go alone, & perhaps it is better. There are but few I could travel with & yet keep my own thread of thoughts unwispy & unentangled. The journey to Palestine will give one really a great deal to think of in many ways. Sir J. Reid says I must do a large Jerusalem and get Sir Moses M. or Rothschild to buy it. Now I finish 3 Alphabets for children — and so get pretty wearied at end of the week. O! for a quiet passage! And again ditto from Alexda. to Jaffa! I shall leave off now, & wind up.

  1. In this letter of the 19th, Fortescue says: “While in bed received a summons from my sister to go down to her instantly, she having lost her little boy.” [↩]
  2. The passage with reference to Lady Waldegrave in the previous letter. [↩]
  3. F. Clowes was a godson of Lear’s, I think. He was some relation of the Lancashire Hornbys and in the 8th Hussars. [↩]