this: Nero, and the delicacy of Spring: all
very human however. Then at half past one lunch on Cambridge cream
cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from
the grass: and then coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister
winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful
little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs the world away.
You think I live in Epicurean ease: but this happens to be a jolly day:
one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always
clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity.
But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it. . . .
Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street. {60a}
So he has lost a little child: and moreover has been sorry to do so.
Well, good-bye my dear John Allen: Auld Lang Syne. My kind regards to
your Lady.

Down to the vale this water steers,
How merrily it goes:
'T will murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows. {60b}

E. F. G.

GELDESTONE HALL, BECCLES.

_To Bernard Barton_.

BEDFORD, _July_ 24, 1839.

DEAR BARTON,

. . . I have brought down here with me Sydney Smith's Works, now first
collected: you will delight in them: I shall bring them to Suffolk when I
come: and it will not be long, I dare say, before I come, as there is to
be rather a large meeting of us at Boulge this August. I have got the
fidgets in my right arm and hand (how the inconvenience redoubles as one
mentions it)--do you know what the fidgets are?--a true ailment, though
perhaps not a dangerous one. Here I am again in the land of old
Bunyan--better still in the land of the more perennial Ouse, making many
a fantastic winding and going much out of his direct way to fertilize and
adorn. Fuller supposes that he lingers thus in the pleasant fields of
Bedfordshire, being in no hurry to enter the more barren fens of
Lincolnshire. So he says. This house is just on the edge of the town: a
garden on one side skirted by the public road which again is skirted by a
row of such Poplars as only the Ouse knows how to rear--and pleasantly
they rustle now--and the room in which I write is quite cool and opens
into a greenhouse which opens into said garden: and it's all deuced
pleasant. For in half an hour I shall seek my Piscator, {61a} and we
shall go to a Village {61b} two miles off and fish, and have tea in a pot-
house, and so