Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a
book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?
So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the
times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they
are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's
right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of
themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company,
I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint.
Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I have
good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class below. They are
effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George
Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than
in fancying that by keeping down manly [Greek: thymos], which Plato
saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They
were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and
'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after
that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the
poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier
and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy.
Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow
his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other
day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of ----, who
cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when
he saw the melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and would
try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried
it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even
his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at
Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run
I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as
good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over
Hazeley Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and a
streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time
fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight,
and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank
broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd
time to fall