windled. Can I hoe turnips, or poke a knowledgeable finger into the
flanks of beeves? I wonder if your literary explorations ever led you
across the furrow of an ancient ploughman who--

--on a May morning, on Malvern hills

was weary of wandering and laid him down to sleep beside a brook--having
been chased thither betimes, no doubt, by a nagging bedfellow.
I have no wife, nor mean to take one, and find it more to my comfort to
sleep here by the River Charles and dream of Malvern, secure that I
shall wake to find myself detached from it by half a world.

Yet your last letter touched me closely; for it happens that Sir O. V.,
for love of whom rather than for any better reason I have kept this
exile, has taken to himself a Lady. That, you'll say, should be my
dismissal; and that I like her, as she appears willing to be friends
with me, gives me, you'll say again, no excuse to linger. Yet I do, and
shall.

As for her history, Vyell picked her up in a God-forsaken fishing town,
some leagues up the coast; brought her home; placed her under
gouvernante and tutors; finally espoused her. Stay: finally he has
built a palace for her, "Eagles" by name, whither he forces all Boston
to pay its homage. For convenience of access to the goddess he has cut
a road twenty feet broad through the woodlands of her demesne.

The palace in a woody vale they found,
High-raised, of stone--

or, to speak accurately, of stone and timber combined. Be pleased to
imagine a river very much like that of Richmond, but covered with grey
crags. "Fie," you will say, "the site is savage, then, like all else in
this New World?" My dear sir, you were never more mistaken.
Mr. Manley's young eye of genius fastened upon it at once, to adapt it
to a house and gardens in the Italian style.

Have I mentioned this Mr. Manley in former letters? He is a young
gentleman of good Midland blood (his county, I believe, Bedfordshire),
with a moderate talent for drinking, a something more than talent for
living on his friends, and a positive genius for architecture.
He will have none of your new craze for Gothic. Palladio is his god,
albeit he allows that Palladio had feet of clay, and corrects him
boldly--though always, as he tells me, with help of his minor deities,
Vignola and the rest, who built the great villas around Rome. He has
studied in Italy, and tells me that at Florence he was much beholden to
your friend Mann, who, I dare sw