| Dear Engels,

In exchange for your very good Rhine wine I send you some bad Lager Bier, which to Mohr’s joy, we have discovered in a house in Leicester Square.

 Siehe Marx an Engels, 26.6.1869.
Schließen Yesterday Mohr and I went to the Kensington museum to the annual conversazione of the Society of Arts, for which we had had an invitation. All I can say is, they w’ont catch us there a second time. Of all dreary concerns a conversazione certainly is the dreariest. What genius the English have for the inventing of melancholy pleasures! Fancy a crowd of some 7,000 mutes in full evening dress, wedged in so closely as to be unable either to move about or to | sit down, for the chairs, & they were few and far between, a few imperturbable dowagers had taken by storm and stuck to throughout the evening. Of the works of art, (the Queen has sacked all the museums of the people, in order to carry off their treasures to this aristocratic and favourite resorts of the “belated lamented"), it was next to impossible to get a glimpse. Nothing was to be seen but silks, satins, brocades and laces, and these too on the ugliest of pegs—on women, vulgar, coarse-featured, dull-eyed, and either short and stumpy or tall and lank. Of the much talked of beauty of the English aristocracy there was’nt a trace. We saw only two passably pretty girls.

Among the men there was a sprinkling of interesting faces, the owners of which were | probably artists, but the great majority consisted of insipid-looking Dundrearys and parsons all run to fat. Mohr did not see Ludlow. My impression of the Society of Arts is, that it is a Society of Snobs much given to tuft-hunting. But I will enclose  Abdruck des Textes nach der Handschrift (IISG Marx-Engels-Nachlass, Sign.: L 3861/L V 595); Druck: Bach u. Senekina: Briefe von Mitgliedern der Famile Marx an Friedrich Engels (1983). S. 358 Anm. 27.
Schließen an appeal Mohr received along with his card. That will give you a better insight into the Society than anything I can say about it.

I am going to Eastbourne on Monday.

Give my love to Mrs Burns and Tussy