To F. Tennyson.

Ireland, July 26, 1841.

My dear Frederic,

I got your letter ten days ago in London on my way here.  We have incessant rain, which is as bad as your sciroccos; at least it damps my energies very much.  But people are accustomed to it in Ireland: and my uncle (in whose house I am staying) is just set off with three of his children—on horseback—cantering and laughing away in the midst of a hopeless shower.  I am afraid some of us are too indolent for such things.

I am glad Morton has taken up painting in good earnest, and I shall encourage him to persevere as much as I can. . . .  I have begun to draw a little—the fit comes upon one in summer with the foliage: as to sunshine, so necessary for pictures, I have been obliged to do without that.  We have had scarce a ray for a month . . .  I have read nothing, except the Annual Register: which is not amiss in a certain state of mind, and is not easily exhausted.  A goodly row of some hundred very thick volumes which may be found in every country town wherever one goes forbid all danger of exhaustion.  So long as there is appetite, there is food: and of that plain substantial nature which, Johnson says, suits the stomach of middle life.  Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one’s sonneteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact.  Do you know anything of poor Sir Egerton Brydges?—this, in talking of sonnets—poor fellow, he wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire them also.  He lived in haughty seclusion, and at the end of life wrote a doating Autobiography.  He writes good prose however, and shews himself as he is very candidly: indeed he is proud of the display.

All this is not meant to be a lesson to you who write, everybody says, good sonnets.  Sir E. Brydges would have been the same dilettante if he had written Epics—probably worse.  I certainly don’t like sonnets, as you know: we have been spoiled for them by Daddy Wordsworth, ---, and Co.  Moxon must write them too forsooth.  What do they seem fit for but to serve as little shapes in which a man may mould very mechanically any single thought which comes into his head, which thought is not lyrical enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical measure?  The difficulty of the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither prose nor poetry.  I have rather a wish to tie old Wordsworth’s volume about his neck and pitch him into one of the deepest holes of his dear Duddon.

You must allow I am a good correspondent—this half year at least.  This is Septr. 2, a most horrible day for a Bazaar, judging at least by the weather here.  But you may be better off.  I came to this house a week ago to visit a male friend, who duly started to England the day before I got here.  I therefore found myself domiciled in a house filled with ladies of divers ages—Edgeworth’s wife, aged—say 28—his mother aged 74—his sister (the great Maria) aged 72—and another cousin or something—all these people very pleasant and kind: the house pleasant: the grounds ditto: a good library: . . . so here I am quite at home.  But surely I must go to England soon: it seems to me as if that must take place soon: and so send me a letter directed to me at Mr. Watcham’s, Naseby, Thornby.  Those places are in England.  You may put Northampton after Thornby if you like.  I am going to look at the winding up of the harvest there.

I long to hear how the Bazaar went off: and so I beg you to tell me all about it.  When I began this letter I thought I had something to say: but I believe the truth was I had nothing to do.  When you see my dear Major [89] give him my love, and tell him I wish he were here to go to Connemara with me: I have no heart to go alone.  The discomfort of Irish inns requires a companion in misery.  This part of the country is poorer than any I have yet seen: the people becoming more Spanish also in face and dress.  Have you read The Collegians? [90a]

I have now begun to sketch heads on the blotting paper on which my paper rests—a sure sign, as Miss Edgeworth tells me, that I have said quite enough.  She is right.  Good-bye.  In so far as this country is Ireland I am glad to be here: but inasmuch as it is not England I wish I were there.

To S. Laurence.

Naseby, Septr. 28/41.

My dear Laurence,

. . . Do you know that I wanted you to come down by the railroad and see me here: where there is nothing else to be seen but myself: which would have been a comfort to you.  I have been staying here three weeks alone, smoking with farmers, looking at their lands, and taking long walks alone: during which (as well as when I was in Ireland) I made such sketches as will make you throw down your brush in despair.  I wish you would ask at Molteno’s or Colnaghi’s for a new Lithographic print of a head of Dante, after a fresco by Giotto, lately discovered in some chapel [90b] at Florence.  It is the most wonderful head that ever was seen—Dante at about twenty-seven years old: rather younger.  The Edgeworths had a print in Ireland: got by great interest in Florence before the legitimate publication: but they told me it was to be abroad in September.  If you can get me a copy, pray do.

I am surprised you think my scanty letters are worth encouraging, especially with such long and excellent answers as that I have just got from you.  It has found its way down here: and oddly enough does your Italian scenery, painted, I believe, very faithfully upon my inner eye, contrast with the British barrenness of the Field of Naseby.  Yet here was fought a battle of some interest to Englishmen: and I am persuading farmers to weed well the corn that grows over those who died there.  No, no; in spite of your Vesuviuses and sunshine, I love my poor dear brave barren ugly country.  Talk of your Italians! why, they are extinguished by the Austrians because they don’t blaze enough of themselves to burn the extinguisher.  Only people who deserve despotism are forced to suffer it.  We have at last good weather: and the harvest is just drawing to a close in this place.  It is a bright brisk morning, and the loaded waggons are rolling cheerfully past my window.  But since I wrote what is above a whole day has passed: I have eaten a bread dinner: taken a lonely walk: made a sketch of Naseby (not the least like yours of Castellamare): played for an hour on an old tub of a piano: and went out in my dressing-gown to smoke a pipe with a tenant hard by.  That tenant (whose name is Love, by the bye) was out with his folks in the stack yard: getting in all the corn they can, as the night looks rainy.  So, disappointed of my projected ‘talk about runts’ and turnips, I am come back—with a good deal of animal spirits at my tongue’s and fingers’ ends.  If I were transported now into your room at Castellamare, I would wag my tongue far beyond midnight with you.  These fits of exultation are not very common with me: as (after leaving off beef) my life has become of an even grey paper character: needing no great excitement, and as pleased with Naseby as Naples. . . .

I am reading Schlegel’s lectures on the History of Literature: a nice just book: as also the comedies of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar: the latter very delightful: as also D’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation, a good book.  When I am tired of one I take up the other: when tired of all, I take up my pipe, or sit down and recollect some of Fidelio on the pianoforte.  Ah Master Tennyson, we in England have our pleasures too.  As to Alfred, I have heard nothing of him since May: except that some one saw him going to a packet which he believed was going to Rotterdam. . . .  When shall you and I go to an Opera again, or hear one of Beethoven’s Symphonies together?  You are lost to England, I calculate: and I am given over to turnips and inanity.  So runs the world away.  Well, if I never see you again, I am very very glad I have seen you: and got the idea of a noble fellow all ways into my head.  Does this seem like humbug to you?  But it is not.  And that fine fellow Morton too.  Pray write when you can to me: and when my stars shine so happily about my head as they do at this minute, when my blood feels like champagne, I will answer you. . .

I am afraid you were disappointed last night at finding no picture by the Shannon. [93]  Mayhap you had asked Mr C[hurchyard] to come and give his judgment upon it over toasted cheese.  But the truth is, the picture has just been varnished with mastick varnish, which is apt to chill with the cold at this season of the year: and so I thought it best to keep it by me till its conveyance should be safer.  I hope that on Monday you will get it.  But I must tell you that, besides the reason of the varnish, I have had a sneaking desire to keep the picture by me, and not to lose it from my eyes just yet.  I am in love with it.  I washed it myself very carefully with only sweet salad oil: perfectly innocuous as you may imagine: and that, with the new lining, and the varnishing, has at least made the difference between a dirty and a clean beauty.  And now, whoever it may be painted by, I pronounce it a very beautiful picture: tender, graceful, full of repose.  I sit looking at it in my room and like it more and more.  All this is independent of its paternity.  But if I am asked about that, I should only answer on my own judgment (not a good one in such a matter, as I have told you) that it is decidedly by Gainsborough, and in his best way of conception.  My argument would be of the Johnsonian kind: if it is not by G., who the devil is it by?  There are some perhaps feeble touches here and there in the tree in the centre, though not in those autumnal leaves that shoot into the sky to the right: but who painted that clump of thick solemn trees to the left of the picture:—the light of evening rising like a low fire between their boles?  The cattle too in the water, how they stand!  The picture must be an original of somebody’s: and if not of Gainsborough’s—whose?  It is better painted far than the Market Cart in the National Gallery: but not better, only equal (in a sketchy way) to the beautiful evening Watering Place.

Our prospect of going down to Suffolk this year is much on the wane: the Doctor has desired that Lusia should remain in town.  Though I should like much to see you and others, yet I am on the whole glad that my sisters should stay here, where they are likely to be better off.  I shall stay with them, as I am of use.  I may however run down one day to give you a look.  I wish you would enquire and let me know how Mr. Jenney [96] is: he was not well when my Father was in Suffolk.  Only don’t ask himself: he hates that.  And now farewell.  This is a long letter: but look at it by way of notice when the picture comes to you.  If it does not come on Monday don’t be angry: but it probably will.

Brighton, Dec. 29, 1841.

My dear Barton,

The account you give of my old Squire ‘that he is in a poorish way’ does not satisfy me: and I want you to ask Mr. Jones the surgeon, whom you know, and who used to attend on the Squire,—to ask him, I say, how that Squire is.  He has been ill for the last two or three winters, and may not be worse now than before.  He is one of our oldest friends: and though he and I have not very much in common, he is a part of my country of England, and involved in the very idea of the quiet fields of Suffolk.  He is the owner of old Bredfield House in which I was born—and the seeing him cross the stiles between Hasketon and Bredfield, and riding with his hounds over the lawn, is among the scenes in that novel called The Past which dwell most in my memory.  What is the difference between what has been, and what never has been, none?  At the same time this Squire, so hardy, is indignant at the idea of being ill or laid up: so one must inquire of him by some roundabout means. . . .

         Oh beate Sesti,
Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam. [97]

But it is very stately reading.  As to old Niebuhr, it is mean to attack old legends that can’t defend themselves.  And what does it signify in the least if they are true or not?  Whoever actively believed that Romulus was suckled by a wolf?  But I have found in Horace a proper motto for those lumbering Germans:

Quis Parthum paveat? quis gelidum Scythen?
Quis Germania quos horrida parturit
Fœtus? [98]

To Bernard Barton.

[Geldestone, Jan. 1842.]

My dear Sir,

You tell my Father you mean to write a Poem about my invisibility—and somehow it seems strange to myself that I have been so long absent from Woodbridge.  It was a toss up (as boys say—and perhaps Gods) whether I should go now:—the toss has decided I should not.  On the contrary I am going to see Donne at Mattishall: a visit, which having put off a fortnight ago, I am now determined to pay.  But if I do not see you before I go to London, I shall assuredly be down again by the latter part of February: when toasted cheese and ale shall again unite our souls.  You need not however expect that I can return to such familiar intercourse as once (in former days) passed between us.  New honours in society have devolved upon me the necessity of a more dignified deportment.  A letter has been sent from the Secretary of the Ipswich Mechanics’ Institution asking me to Lecture—any subject but Party Politics or Controversial Divinity.  On my politely declining, another, a fuller, and a more pressing, letter was sent urging me to comply with their demand: I answered to the same effect, but with accelerated dignity.  I am now awaiting the third request in confidence: if you see no symptoms of its being mooted, perhaps you will kindly propose it.  I have prepared an answer.  Donne is mad with envy.  He consoles himself with having got a Roman History to write for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia. [99]  What a pity it is that only Lying Histories are readable.  I am afraid Donne will stick to what is considered the Truth too much.

This is a day like May: I and the children have been scrambling up and down the sides of a pit till our legs ache.

Jan. 24/42.

Dear Barton,

You mistake.  The Poacher was bought in his shell—for £3—did I not name that price?  As you desire a packing case, I will order one to day: and I hope you will have him down on Wednesday, just when your Bank work is over, and you will be glad of such good company.  One of my friends thought the picture must have been an anticipation of Bill Sykes: put a cap and feathers on his head and you make him Iago, Richard the Third, or any other aristocratic villain.  I really think the picture is a very good one of its kind: and one that you will like. [100a]

I am going to get my large Constable very lightly framed, and shall bring it down into Suffolk with me to shew you and others.  I like it more and more.

. . . There is something poetical, and almost heroic, in this Expedition to the Niger—the motives lofty and Christian—the issue so disastrous.  Do you remember in A. Cunningham’s Scottish Songs [100b] one called ‘The Darien Song’?  It begins

We will go, maidens, go,
To the primrose [100c] woods and mourn, etc.

Look for it.  It applies to this business.  Some Scotch young folks went out to colonize Darien, and never came back.

Oh there were white hands wav’d,
   And many a parting hail,
As their vessel stemm’d the tide,
   And stretch’d her snowy sail.

I remember reading this at Aldbro’, and the sound of the sea hangs about it always, as upon the lips of a shell.

These fast-following letters of mine seem intended to refute a charge made against me by Morton: that I had only so much impulse of correspondence as resulted from the receipt of a friend’s letter.  Is it very frivolous to write all these letters, on no business whatsoever?  What I think is, that one will soon be going into the country, where one hears no music, and sees no pictures, and so one will have nothing to write about.  I mean to take down a Thucydides, to feed on: like a whole Parmesan.  But at present here I am in London: last night I went to see Acis and Galatea brought out, with Handel’s music, and Stanfield’s scenery: really the best done thing I have seen for many a year.  As I sat alone (alone in spirit) in the pit, I wished for you: and now Sunday is over: I have been to church: I have dined at Portland Place: [102] and now I come home to my lodgings: light my pipe: and will whisper something over to Italy.  You talk of your Naples: and that one cannot understand Theocritus without having been on those shores.  I tell you, you can’t understand Macready without coming to London and seeing his revival of Acis and Galatea.  You enter Drury Lane at a quarter to seven: the pit is already nearly full: but you find a seat, and a very pleasant one.  Box doors open and shut: ladies take off their shawls and seat themselves: gentlemen twist their side curls: the musicians come up from under the stage one by one: ’tis just upon seven: Macready is very punctual: Mr. T. Cooke is in his place with his marshal’s baton in his hand: he lifts it up: and off they set with old Handel’s noble overture.  As it is playing, the red velvet curtain (which Macready has substituted, not wisely, for the old green one) draws apart: and you see a rich drop scene, all festooned and arabesqued with River Gods, Nymphs, and their emblems; and in the centre a delightful, large, good copy of Poussin’s great landscape (of which I used to have a print in my rooms) where the Cyclops is seen seated on a mountain, looking over the sea-shore.  The overture ends, the drop scene rises, and there is the sea-shore, a long curling bay: the sea heaving under the moon, and breaking upon the beach, and rolling the surf down—the stage!  This is really capitally done.  But enough of description.  The choruses were well sung, well acted, well dressed, and well grouped; and the whole thing creditable and pleasant.  Do you know the music?  It is of Handel’s best: and as classical as any man who wore a full-bottomed wig could write.  I think Handel never gets out of his wig: that is, out of his age: his Hallelujah chorus is a chorus not of angels, but of well-fed earthly choristers, ranged tier above tier in a Gothic cathedral, with princes for audience, and their military trumpets flourishing over the full volume of the organ.  Handel’s gods are like Homer’s, and his sublime never reaches beyond the region of the clouds.  Therefore I think that his great marches, triumphal pieces, and coronation anthems, are his finest works.  There is a little bit of Auber’s, at the end of the Bayadère when the God resumes his divinity and retires into the sky, which has more of pure light and mystical solemnity than anything I know of Handel’s: but then this is only a scrap: and Auber could not breathe in that atmosphere long: whereas old Handel’s coursers, with necks with thunder clothed and long resounding pace, never tire.  Beethoven thought more deeply also: but I don’t know if he could sustain himself so well.  I suppose you will resent this praise of Beethoven: but you must be tired of the whole matter, written as it is in this vile hand: and so here is an end of it. . . .  And now I am going to put on my night-cap: for my paper is nearly ended, and the iron tongue of St. Paul’s, as reported by an East wind, has told twelve.  This is the last news from the city.  So Good night.  I suppose the violets will be going off in the Papal dominions by the time this letter reaches you: my country cousins are making much of a few aconites.  Love to Morton.

When I rate you (as you call it) about shewing my verses, letters, etc., you know in what spirit I rate you: thanking you all the time for your generous intention of praising me.  It would be very hard, and not desirable, to make you understand why my Mama need not have heard the verses: but it is a very little matter: so no more of it.  As to my doing anything else in that way, I know that I could write volume after volume as well as others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease: but I think unless a man can do better, he had best not do at all; I have not the strong inward call, nor cruel-sweet pangs of parturition, that prove the birth of anything bigger than a mouse.  With you the case is different, who have so long been a follower of the Muse, and who have had a kindly, sober, English, wholesome, religious spirit within you that has communicated kindred warmth to many honest souls.  Such a creature as Augusta—John’s wife—a true Lady, was very fond of your poems: and I think that is no mean praise: a very good assurance that you have not written in vain.  I am a man of taste, of whom there are hundreds born every year: only that less easy circumstances than mine at present are compel them to one calling: that calling perhaps a mechanical one, which overlies all their other, and naturally perhaps more energetic impulses.  As to an occasional copy of verses, there are few men who have leisure to read, and are possessed of any music in their souls, who are not capable of versifying on some ten or twelve occasions during their natural lives: at a proper conjunction of the stars.  There is no harm in taking advantage of such occasions.

This letter-writing fit (one must suppose) can but happen once in one’s life: though I hope you and I shall live to have many a little bargain for pictures.  But I hold communion with Suffolk through you.  In this big London all full of intellect and pleasure and business I feel pleasure in dipping down into the country, and rubbing my hand over the cool dew upon the pastures, as it were.  I know very few people here: and care for fewer; I believe I should like to live in a small house just outside a pleasant English town all the days of my life, making myself useful in a humble way, reading my books, and playing a rubber of whist at night.  But England cannot expect long such a reign of inward quiet as to suffer men to dwell so easily to themselves.  But Time will tell us:

         Come what come may,
Time and the Hour runs through the roughest day. [106]

It is hard to give you so long a letter, so dull an one, and written in so cramped a hand, to read in this hardworking part of your week.  But you can read a bit at odd times, you know: or none at all.  Anyhow ’tis time to have done.  I am going to walk with Lusia.  So farewell

P.S.  I always direct to you as ‘Mr. Barton’ because I know not if Quakers ought to endure Squiredom.  How I long to shew you my Constable!

Pray let me know how Mr. Jenney is.  I think that we shall get down to Suffolk the end of next week.

London, Febr. 25/42.

On second thoughts I shall not send you down my Twilight: but bring it with me.  I like it much, and do not repent the purchase.  As to the difficulty of bringing down so many pictures, I shall travel by the steamer; which will bear any quantity.  The great new purchase, spoken of in yesterday’s letter, will also go with me: it will be insured at a high valuation before it is entrusted to the Deep, of whose treasures I don’t at all wish it to become one.  My Titian is a great hit: if not by him, it is as near him as ever was painted.  But you would not care six straws for it.  The history of the finest theory of colouring lies in those few inches of canvas.  But Laurence (who has gone for some days into the country) must see it, and tell me about it.  He is so good a judge, that I ought never to talk till I have first heard his verdict.

I was amused at a passage in Clarissa the other day, which gives one some idea of what the average state of the arts was among the gentry of a hundred years ago.  Miss Howe, in drawing up a character of her lost Clarissa, says that among other things she had a fine taste for the Pencil: had not time to practise it much, but ‘was an absolute mistress of the “should be,”’ and then proceeds thus: ‘To give a familiar instance for the sake of young Ladies: she (untaught) observed when but a child, that the Sun, Moon, and Stars, never appeared at once: and were therefore never to be in one piece: that bears, tygers, lions, were not natives of an English climate, and should not therefore have a place in an English landscape: that these ravagers of the forest consorted not with lambs, kids, or fawns: nor kites, hawks, or vultures, with doves, partridges, and pheasants.’  Such was a prodigy in those days.  It is easy to sneer at this passage: but whoever has read anything of the Masques, etc., of James’s time, will readily recall what absurdities were brought together, even by the good Scholars of the day: and therefore will not wonder at the imperfect Natural History that was found in young Ladies’ Drawings, and samplers.  I remember now to have seen wonderful combinations of phenomena in those samplers which are occasionally to be found hung up in the parlours of Country Inns, and Farm houses.

London, March 5, 1842.

My Father talks of going down to Suffolk early next week.  Whether I shall accompany him is not certain.  Do you remember what a merry Good Friday you and I passed last year?  I suppose I shall find the banks covered with primroses, the very name carries a dew upon it.

‘As one who long in populous city pent, etc.’ [111]

Good-bye.  I am going to pay my compliments at Portland Place, and then to walk in a contrary direction to Holborn.

To F. Tennyson.

[31 March, 1842.]

Dear Frederic,

. . . Concerning the bagwigs of composers.  Handel’s was not a bagwig, which was simply so named from the little stuffed black silk watch-pocket that hung down behind the back of the wearer.  Such were Haydn’s and Mozart’s—much less influential on the character: much less ostentatious in themselves: not towering so high, nor rolling down in following curls so low as to overlay the nature of the brain within.  But Handel wore the Sir Godfrey Kneller wig: greatest of wigs: one of which some great General of the day used to take off his head after the fatigue of the battle, and hand over to his valet to have the bullets combed out of it.  Such a wig was a fugue in itself.  I don’t understand your theory about trumpets, which have always been so little spiritual in use, that they have been the provocatives and celebrators of physical force from the beginning of the world.  ‘Power,’ whether spiritual or physical, is the meaning of the trumpet: and so, well used, as you say, by Handel in his approaches to the Deity.  The fugue in the overture to the Messiah expresses perhaps the thorny wandering ways of the world before the voice of the one in the wilderness, and before ‘Comfort ye my people, etc.’  Mozart, I agree with you, is the most universal musical genius: Beethoven has been too analytical and erudite: but his inspiration is nevertheless true.  I have just read his Life by Moscheles: well worth reading.  He shewed no very decided preference for music when a child, though he was the son of a composer: and I think that he was, strictly speaking, more of a thinker than a musician.  A great genius he was somehow.  He was very fond of reading: Plutarch and Shakespeare his great favourites.  He tried to think in music: almost to reason in music: whereas perhaps we should be contented with feeling in it.  It can never speak very definitely.  There is that famous ‘Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, etc.,’ in Handel: nothing can sound more simple and devotional: but it is only lately adapted to these words, being originally (I believe) a love song in Rodelinda.  Well, lovers adore their mistresses more than their God.  Then the famous music of ‘He layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, etc.,’ was originally fitted to an Italian pastoral song—‘Nasce al bosco in rozza cuna, un felice pastorello, etc.’  That part which seems so well to describe ‘and walketh on the wings of the wind’ falls happily in with ‘e con l’aura di fortuna’ with which this pastorello sailed along.  The character of the music is ease and largeness: as the shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind.  The music breathes ease: but words must tell us who takes it easy.  Beethoven’s Sonata—Op. 14—is meant to express the discord and gradual atonement of two lovers, or a man and his wife: and he was disgusted that every one did not see what was meant: in truth, it expresses any resistance gradually overcome—Dobson shaving with a blunt razor, for instance.  Music is so far the most universal language, that any one piece in a particular strain symbolizes all the analogous phenomena spiritual or material—if you can talk of spiritual phenomena.  The Eroica symphony describes the battle of the passions as well as of armed men.  This is long and muddy discourse: but the walls of Charlotte Street present little else, especially during this last week of Lent, to twaddle about.  The Cambridge Dons have been up in town for the Easter vacation: so we have smoked and talked over Peacock, Whewell, etc.  Alfred is busy preparing a new volume for the press: full of doubts, troubles, etc.  The reviewers will doubtless be at him: and with justice for many things: but some of the poems will outlive the reviewers.  Trench, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Taylor, also appear in new volumes this Spring, and Milnes, I hear, talks of publishing a popular edition of his poems.  He means, a cheap one.  Nothing has been heard of Spedding: [114a] but we all conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped.

To W. F. Pollock. [114b]

Boulge Hall, May 11/42.

Dear Pollock,

. . . I have just been reading the great Library of Athanasius. [114c]  Certainly only you and I and Thackeray understand it.  When men like Spedding quote to me such a passage as ‘Athanasius alas is innocent of many smiles, etc.,’ they shew me they don’t understand it.  The beauty—if one may dare to define—lies more in such expressions as ‘adjusting the beaks of the macaws, etc.’  I have laughed outright (how seldom one does this alone!) at the Bishops’ meeting.  ‘Mr. Talboys—that candle behind Dr. Allnut—really that I should be obliged—.’  I suppose this would be the most untranslateable book in the world.  I never shall forget how I laughed when I first read it.

[Geldestone Hall, 22 May 1842.]

. . . So Alfred is come out. [115a]  I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc.  But the bald men [115b] of the Embassy would tell you otherwise.  I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem.  Lord Bacon’s, honesty may, I am sure, be found there.  Alfred, whatever he may think, cannot trifle—many are the disputes we have had about his powers of badinage, compliment, waltzing, etc.  His smile is rather a grim one.  I am glad the book is come out, though I grieve for the insertion of these little things, on which reviewers and dull readers will fix; so that the right appreciation of the book will be retarded a dozen years. . . .

The rain will not come and we are burnt up, and in despair.  But the country never looked more delicious than it does.  I am as happy here as possible, though I don’t like to boast.  I am going to see my friend Donne in ten days, he is writing the dullest of histories—one of Rome.  What the devil does it signify setting us in these days right as to the Licinian Rogation, and Livy’s myths?  Every school-boy knew that Livy lied; but the main story was clear enough for all the purposes of experience; and, that being so, the more fabulous and entertaining the subsidiary matter is the better.  Tell Thackeray not to go into Punch yet.

I sit writing this at my bedroom window, while the rain (long-looked for) patters on the window.  I prophesied it to-day: which is a great comfort.  We have a housefull of the most delightful children: and if the rain would last, and the grass grow, all would be well.  I think the rain will last: I shall prophesy so when I go down to our early dinner.  For it is Sunday: and we dine children and all at one o’clock: and go to afternoon church, and a great tea at six—then a pipe (except for the young ladies)—a stroll—a bit of supper—and to bed.  Wake in the morning at five—open the window and read Ecclesiasticus.  A proverb says that ‘everything is fun in the country.’

To F. Tennyson.

I have been long hoping for a letter from you: it has come this morning, and repays me for all waiting.  While you and Morton write to me about Italy I shall never go to see it.  And yet your account of Cicero’s villa, I confess, gives me a twinge.  But of this I am sure: if I saw all these fine things with the bodily eye, I should but see them as a scene in a play, with the additional annoyance of being bitten with fleas perhaps, and being in a state of transition which is not suitable to me: whereas while you see them, and will represent them to me, I see them through your imagination, and that is better than any light of my own.  This is very true, I assure you: and you and Morton have given me quite a different view of Italy to what I had before: a much more enchanting one, but not the more likely to seduce me into making the false step of trying to realize it for myself. . . .  In the mean time how tired and bored would you be to take one of my travels—a voyage of eight miles from Bedford perhaps—travelled twenty times before—every winding of the river, every church-spire, every country pot house and the quality of its beer, well known.  No surprise at all.  Nil admirari—I find that old Horace is a good fellow-traveller in England: so is Virgil.  It is odd that those fellows living in the land they did live in should have talked so coldly about it.  As to Alfred’s book, I believe it has sold well: but I have not seen him for a long while, and have had no means of hearing about the matter except from Thompson, who told me that very many copies had been sold at Cambridge, which indeed will be the chief market for them.  Neither have I seen any notice of them in print except that in the Examiner; and that seemed so quiet that I scarce supposed it was by Forster.  Alfred himself is, I believe, in Kent at present.  And now, my dear Frederic, why do you think of returning to England?  Depend upon it you are better off as you are.  You will never turn magistrate nor bean-dibbler, nor make yourself of use in the country, and therefore why should you not live where you like to live best?  When I read of your laughing and singing and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South I am sure you had best stay where you are.  I should indeed be very glad to see you again: but then I should miss hearing from you: and you would only come here to abuse us all and go back again.  You Tennysons are born for warm climates.  As to poor England, I never see a paper, but I think with you that she is on the go.  I used to dread this: but somehow I now contemplate it as a necessary thing, and, till the shoe begins to pinch me sorely, walk on with some indifference.  It seems impossible the manufacturers can go on as they are: and impossible that the demand for our goods can continue as of old in Europe: and impossible but that we must get a rub and licking in some of our colonies: and if all these things come at once, why then the devil’s in it.  I used to think as you do about France and the French: and we all agreed in London that France should be divided among the other powers as Poland was: but Donne has given me pause: he says that France is the great counteracting democratic principle to Russia.  This may be: though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a huge progress in conquest.  What is to be thought of a nation where the upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and intrigue?  Russia does not seem a whole to me.  In the mean time, all goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or hero), and man shall have wings to fly and something much better than that in the end. . . .

I draw a very little, and think of music as I walk in the fields: but have no piano in this part of the world. . . .  I hear there is a fine new Symphony by Mendelssohn, who is by far our best writer now, and in some measure combines Beethoven and Handel.  I grow every day more and more to love only the old God save the King style: the common chords, those truisms of music, like other truisms so little understood in the full.  Just look at the mechanism of Robin Adair.

To John Allen.

. . . I am much entêté at present about one Matthews, [122] a preacher at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to Chartists, etc.  If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him.  I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford.  All this you will think absurd; and so perhaps it is.

I have been reading Stobæus’ Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose.  The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable.  And this is really all I have looked at all this summer.

Bedford, August 29/42.

My dearest Fellow,

Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure.  An old acquaintance is not the worse for its wear, I think.  This very time ten years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees’ boarding-house at Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man [123] at whose house I am now staying:—then a boy of sixteen.  He is now a man of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September than on anything else in the world.  I see very little of him. . . .

I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of Stobæus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and a little Dante and a little Shakespeare.  But the great secret of all is the not eating meat.  To that the world must come, I am sure.  Only it makes one grasshopper foolish.  I also receive letters from Morton and F. Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read.  They came all of a sudden on Cicero’s villa—one of them at least, the Formian—with a mosaic pavement leading thro’ lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain as old as the Augustan age bubbling up as fresh, Tennyson says, ‘as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator as he sate there in the stillness of the noon day, devoting the siesta-hours to study.’  When I first read of these things I wish to see them; but, on reflection, I am sure I see them much better in such letters as these.

I have seen one good picture about here: a portrait of O. Cromwell by Lely—so said—unlike other Lelys, but very carefully painted: and, I should think, an original portrait. . .  I also read Hayley’s Life of Romney the other day.  Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter: but his ideal was not high nor fixed.  How touching is the close of his life!  He married at nineteen, and, because Sir Joshua and others had said that marriage spoilt an artist, almost immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw her till the end of his life: when, old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him, and nursed him till he died.  This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney’s pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am sure.

His virtues walked then humble round,
   Nor knew a pause, nor felt a void:
And sure the Eternal Master found
   His single talent well employ’d.

That was not in playing picquet, I doubt.  What fine lines of Johnson’s [125] these!

* * * * *

On the 15th of September 1842 FitzGerald first made Carlyle’s personal acquaintance.  He always spoke of his having first gone to Chelsea in company with Thackeray, and in the Notes which he left of his excavations at Naseby he repeats what he frequently told myself and others.  But his memory was clearly at fault, for in a letter to Pollock, written on the 16th, but dated by mistake the 17th, of September, he says, ‘I have come up to London for two days on a false errand: and am therefore going back in a pet, to Naseby. . . .  I enquired at Spedding’s rooms to-day: he is expected by the 20th, which is near.  Laurence is the only person I know in town. . . .  He and I went to see Carlyle at Chelsea yesterday.  That genius has been surveying the field of battle of Naseby in company with Dr. Arnold, who died soon after, poor man!  I doubt (from Carlyle’s description) if they identified the very ground of the carnage. . . .  I have heard nothing of Thackeray for these two months.  He was to have visited an Irish brother of mine: but he has not yet done so.  I called at Coram Street yesterday, and old John seemed to think he was yet in Ireland.’  With this correction I now give the Memorandum referred to, which FitzGerald entrusted to my keeping together with several of Carlyle’s letters.  An attempt to put up a monument on the real site of the battle proved abortive, as will appear hereafter.

‘About the middle of September 1842, W. M. Thackeray took me to tea with Carlyle whom I had not previously known.  He was then busy with Cromwell; had just been, he told us, over the Field of Naseby in company with Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and had sufficiently identified the Ground of the Battle with the contemporaneous Accounts of it.  As I happened to know the Field well—the greater part of it then belonging to my Family—I knew that Carlyle and Arnold had been mistaken—misled in part by an Obelisk which my Father had set up as on the highest Ground of the Field, but which they mistook for the centre-ground of the Battle.  This I told Carlyle, who was very reluctant to believe that he and Arnold could have been deceived—that he could accept no hearsay Tradition or Theory against the Evidence of his own Eyes, etc.  However, as I was just then going down to Naseby, I might enquire further into the matter.

‘On arriving at Naseby, I had spade and mattock taken to a hill near half a mile across from the “Blockhead Obelisk,” and pitted with several hollows, overgrown with rank Vegetation, which Tradition had always pointed to as the Graves of the Slain.  One of these I had opened; and there, sure enough, were the remains of Skeletons closely packed together—chiefly teeth—but some remains of Shinbone, and marks of Skull in the Clay.  Some of these, together with some sketches of the Place, I sent to Carlyle.

‘The Naseby Monument, already advised by Carlyle, was not executed at the time: and some how or other was not again talked of till 1855 when the Estate was to be sold from us.  I was told however by the Lawyers, etc., that it was better not to interfere while that Business was going on.  So the Scheme went to sleep again till 1872, when, Carlyle renewing the subject in some Letter, I applied to the Agent of the Estate who was willing to help us in getting permission to erect the Stone, and to a neighbouring Mason to fashion it as Carlyle desired.  We had some difficulty in this latter point, but at last all was settled, when suddenly Agent and Lawyer informed us the thing must not be done—for one reason, that Stone and Inscription were considered too plain.’

Profiting by the unexpected fact that you are now master of Naseby Battlefield, I have gone over the whole matter once more, probably for the twentieth time; I have copied you my illegible pencil-notes, and re-verified everything,—that so, if you can understand the meaning (which will be difficult, I fear), you may append to it what commentary, collected on the spot, you may judge edifying.  Let me, however, again impress upon you that these statements and descriptions are actual facts, gathered with industry from some seven or eight eyewitnesses, looking at the business with their own eyes from seven or eight different sides; that the present figure of the ground, in my recollection, corresponds very tolerably well with the whole of them;—and that no ‘theory,’ by what Professor soever, can be of any use to me in comparison.  I wish you had Sprigge’s complete Plan of the Battle: but you have it not; you have only that foolish Parson’s [128] very dim copy of it, and must help yourself with that.

The things I wish you to give me are first: The whole story of your Blacksmith, or other oral Chronicler, be it wise and credible, be it absurd and evidently false.  Then you can ask, whether there remains any tradition of a windmill at Naseby?  One stands in the Plan, not far from North of the village, probably some 300 yards to the west of where the ass of a column now stands: the whole concern, of fighting, rallying, flying, killing and chasing, transacted itself to the west of that,—on the height, over the brow of the height, down the slope, in the hollow, and up again to the grounds of Dust Hill, where the final dispersion took place.  Therefore, again, pray ask.

Where precisely any dead bodies are known to have been found?  Where and when the last-found was come upon; what they made of it,—whether no Antiquarian kept a tooth; at any rate, a button or the like?  Cannon-balls ought to be found, especially musket-balls, down in that hollow, and on the slope thitherward: is any extant cabinet master of one?

Farther, are there, on the high ground N.W. or W. of Naseby village, any traces still discoverable of such names as these: ‘Lantford hedges’ (or perhaps ‘hedge’); a kind of thicket running up the slope, towards the western environs of Naseby village, nearly from the North;—Fairfax had dragoons hidden here, who fired upon Rupert’s right, as he charged upwards: ‘Rutput Hill’: ‘Fanny Hill’ (according to Rushworth, ‘Famny Hill’ in Sprigge),—probably two swellings in the ground, that lie between the south end of Lantford Hedges and the village; ‘Lean Leaf Hill’ seemingly another swelling, parallel to these, which reaches in with its slope to the very village—from the west: ‘Mill Hill’ farther to the east (marked as due west from the windmill, which of course must have stood upon a part of it), lying therefore upon the north part of the village?  Is it possible, in spite of all ditching and enclosure bills, there may still some vestige of these names adhere to some fields or messuages; the exact position of which it would be satisfactory to fix.  You can also tell me whether Burrough Hill is visible from Naseby, and ‘what it is like’; and what the Sibbertoft height, on the other side, and the Harboro’ Height are like!  I suppose one sees Sibbertoft steeple, but no houses, from Naseby Height?  Also that it was undoubtedly Clipston (as the good Dr. Arnold and I supposed) that we saw there.  Dr. A. and I came, as I find, thro’ Crick, West Hadden, Cold Ashby; and crossed the Welford and Northampton road, perhaps some three miles from Naseby.

You will do me and the Genius of History a real favour, if you persist in these examinations and excavations to the utmost length possible for you!  It is long since I read a letter so interesting as yours of yesterday.  Clearly enough you are upon the very battle-ground;—and I, it is also clear, have only looked up towards it from the slope of Mill Hill.  Were not the weather so wet, were not, etc., etc., so many etceteras, I could almost think of running up to join you still!  But that is evidently unfeasible at present.

But why does the Obelisk stand there?  It might as well stand at Charing Cross; the blockhead that it is!  I again wish I had wings: alas, I wish many things; that the gods would but annihilate Time and Space, which would include all things!