pread into the parish, through England, Europe, etc.,
"as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake."

... Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a
house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into
some scene-behind-scene world on the other side, as harlequins do? A
steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it
ironically tempts one to outrage it. One feels it would close again over
the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of
Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor
cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it could, I feel sure,
discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at
such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied
that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I
occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead. We
find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things:
you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead
rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of
Geneva. We have great laughing over this. The forehead is at present in
Pembrokeshire, I believe; or Glamorganshire; or Monmouthshire: it is
hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there....

[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]

I wish you would write me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I
suppose, at Cambridge, and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a
shame!) here; so that I hear of nobody--except that Spedding and I abuse
each other about Shakespeare occasionally, a subject on which you must
know that he has lost his conscience, if he ever had any. For what did
Dr. Allen ... say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his bumps
were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety--then what
would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q.E.D.

Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of
conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also
where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes,
the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly
compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that
of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book--"The Second
Funeral of Napoleon"? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy
it, as each cop