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Vienna, September 4, 1874
¡Querido amigo!
Under the fresh impression of the reproaches my illegible handwriting drew from you, I “hasten,” as the saying has it, to submit to you a carefully amended sample of my unruly hand and only beg your pardon if, in the course of this letter, the new virtue should revert to the old vice. With very much pleasure, I gather from your letter that you have included Heidelberg and Göttingen among the candidates for your glorious future academic life. I cannot, for the moment, furnish the required information, but may be able to do so within a few days, and I shall hold this letter until I have gathered reliable news. From what I know of other German universities, they start their enrollment of students on October 15-19. Lectures are usually deferred for another week.
I am sending you the second volume of the Pickwickians,1 a novel by Bulwer,2 and our university lecture list at the same time as I post this letter, in order to still your voracious appetite for the robustly monosyllabic English words.3
My proposals for the resuscitation of the Spanish Academy have regard, first of all, to the occasion of your going abroad, but can also be applied to the occasion of your staying in Vienna, albeit with less appeal.
The members of the Spanish Academy are among those modern men whose days number more than twelve working hours and whose nights are robbed of dreams by fatigue. As I am in a whirl of duties and tasks that will make my day seem all too brief, and you in the painful predicament of being a newly bom academic citizen, we will hardly have the leisure or the inclination to give each other the regular and full reports necessary to make our separation tolerable, unless we turn writing into a duty attached to the sublime name of the Ac. Española and therefore demanding fulfillment at fixed times and with unswerving devotion. Hence my proposal amounts to stipulating that every Sunday each of us, the two sole luminaries of the A.E., send the o