A week later, I am transferred here.  Three more months go over and my mother dies.  No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.  Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.  She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.  I had disgraced that name eternally.  I had made it a low by-word among low people.  I had dragged it through the very mire.  I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.  What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.  My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss.  Messages of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection for me.  Even people who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .
