I were together, quarrelling and laughing--these I
remember with pleasure. Our trip to Gravesend has left a perfume with
me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly stopping coach on which
we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone that Sunday morning: worn
out with it, we got down at an inn, and then got up on another coach--and
an old smiling fellow passed us holding out his hat--and you said, 'That
old fellow must go about as Homer did'--and numberless other turns of
road and humour, which sometimes pass before me as I lie in bed. . . .
Now before I turn over, I will go and see about Church, as I hear no
bell, pack myself up as warmly as I can, and be off. So good-bye till
twelve o'clock.--'Tis five minutes past twelve by the stable clock: so I
saw as I returned from Church through the garden. Parson and Clerk got
through the service see saw like two men in a sawpit. In the garden I
see the heads of the snowdrops and crocuses just out of the earth.
Another year with its same flowers and topics to open upon us. Shenstone
somewhere sings, {146a}

Tedious again to mark the drizzling day,
Again to trace the same sad tracts of snow:
Or, lull'd by vernal airs, again survey
The selfsame hawthorn bud, and cowslips blow.

I rely on you and all your family sympathizing in this. So do I
sometimes: anyhow, people complimenting each other on the approach of
Spring and such like felicitations are very tiresome. Our very year is
of a paltry diameter. But this is not proper language for Mark Tapley,
whose greatest bore just now is having a bad pen; but the letter is
ended. So he is jolly and yours as ever.

_To S. Laurence_.

BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE,
_Decr_. 21/43.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

I hope you got safe and sound to London: as I did to this place
yesterday. Those good Tetter people! I have got an attachment to them
somehow. I left Jane {146b} in a turmoil as to which picture of
W[ilkinson] she was to take. I advised her to take a dose of Time, which
always operates so gently.

I have been down to Woodbridge to-day and had a long chat with
Churchyard, whom I wish you had seen, as also his Gainsborough sketches.
He is quite clear as to Gainsborough's general method, which was (he
says) to lay all in (except the sky, of course) with pure colour, quite
unmixed with white. The sketch he has is certainly so; but whether it
ever could have been wrought up into a deep finish, I don't know. C.