George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[197] except with all the rest that is in you. As the Spanish girl tells her sister about love, in one of the old Ballads,—

No saldra del alma
Sin salir con ella.

So the next thing I shall hear of you, after all your Greek and Spanish, will be a seat in the House of Representatives, or a foreign mission. But first you must come here, and swear, like the knight, that it is all naught, and I will believe nothing of what you say, nor even do you the grace to think you perjured.

To Hon. Hugh S. Legare, Washington.¹

Many thanks for your kindness to the Lyells.² They deserved it. You give us the last news we get of them, and the last, perhaps, we ever shall get, if your account of the storm in which they left Washington is to be taken without mitigation. But I suspect you politicians there are so in the habit of exaggeration, that fiction, half the time, comes as handy as fact. At the latest dates, I notice, the Treasury was so empty that the draft of the proper officer, to procure funds to pay members of Congress, was refused. I wish I could believe it. The rule of the Chinese, in relation to their doctors, would apply admirably to all of you at Washington; for they of the Celestial Empire pay their physicians a salary, which stops the moment the payor becomes indisposed, and is renewed as soon as he is well again. And I would pay you all for the time you are not in Washington, cutting off your rations the instant you go there, and begin to talk and act. Besides all other benefits, we should get some of you here at the North, ‘the quarters of the North,’—Satan's kingdom, you know, —where we would make merry excellently; better in a winter's visit than even in a summer's.

Morpeth³ went off a week ago, having given us rather a severe tour of duty here in the way of dining out. You will have him in Washington about the 20th, I suppose, and will entertain him there, no doubt, with bull-fights on the floor of the House, and perhaps a gay affair or so at the President's. But go your ways. You are not to be mended. He is a good-natured fellow, cultivated and intelligent,