The Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving: not for the sake of
the unclean beasts that almost filled it, and probably made most noise
and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality, that was as
much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without....

[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]

Some one from this house is going to London: and I will try and write
you some lines now in half an hour before dinner. 'I am going out for
the evening to my old lady, who teaches me the names of the stars, and
other chaste information. You see, Master John Allen, that if I do not
come to London (and I have no thought of going yet) and you will not
write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not, by the
way, that I am never to go to London again; but not just yet. Here I
live with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive
at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call
perfect happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I
read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the
garden, a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun
manfully not far off. A funny mixture all 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.

... I am living (did I tell you this before?) at a little cottage close
by the lawn gates, where I have my books, a barrel of beer, which I tap
myself (can you tap a barrel of beer?), and an old woman to do for me. I
have also just concocted two gallons of tar-water under the directions
of Bishop Berkeley: it is to be bottled off this very day after a
careful skimming, and then drunk by those who can and will. It is to be
tried first on my old woman; if she survives, I am to begin; and it will
then gradually s