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

The day but one before we left London, we accepted an invitation given in an uncommonly kind manner two days earlier, to dine at Lord Clarendon's. . . . . Just before dinner was announced, Lord Clarendon came up to me and said, with rather a peculiar manner, that attracted my attention at once, ‘Here is a gentleman who wishes to be introduced to you. He has been a good deal in the United States, and knows all about you, but has never seen you; and yet he is a pretty notorious man,—it is Mr. Crampton,’—and then he burst into a very hearty laugh, for which he is somewhat famous, and was joined by Sir Charles Wood, and one or two people near us, who enjoyed the joke to the full.¹ I found Mr. Crampton very agreeable, and immediately noticed his great resemblance to his father, as I knew Sir Philip in 1835. ‘Yes,’ said a person to whom I mentioned it, ‘they still look so much alike that we call them the twins.’ . . . . The Ministry were, no doubt, partly responsible for the mistakes about the enlistment last summer,—more, perhaps, than they can well admit. They were too much engrossed by the Russian war, and the worrying arrangements for the peace before the negotiations began, to be able to give the American difficulty the degree of attention it needed. So I think Crampton will get a place and be contented with it.

To Mrs. William S. Dexter.

Heidelberg, August 8, 1856.

Dearest Lizzie,—I hardly know what I can write to you, your mother and Anna have written so much, except to renew to you expressions of my affection, which you feel as sure of without their repetition as with it. But I must write something; it is a want I feel to have intercourse with you. Only last night I looked over to the other side of the table, thinking to see you there; so entirely have you kept your place in my thoughts. And thus I miss you constantly. Give my love to your husband, and tell him I count upon his making up a great deal of my loss to me, since I give him so much of what is important and dear to my affections.

As I travel about in places more or less familiar to me,—because