y sold puts 7-1/2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty
just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done.
What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last
Review! The last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe
but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The
electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth
fires away about the Odes of Pindar, and Donne is very aesthetic about
Mr. Hallam's book. What is the meaning of "exegetical"? Till I know
that, how can I understand the Review?

Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates
as I knew in the days before they "assumed the purple." I am reading
Gibbon, and see nothing but this d----d colour before my eyes. It
changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial
colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (_vide_ Coleridge and
Eastlake's "Goethe")--even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are
antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same
(_vide_ Coleridge, etc.). Is this aesthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad
I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and
begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to
this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay,
with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted
to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover--requiring, however, a summer
fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year,
etc." This is not an unpleasing style on agricultural subjects--nor an
uncommon one....

* * * * *

You know my way of life so well that I need not describe it to you, as
it has undergone no change since I saw you. I read of mornings--the same
old books over and over again, having no command of new ones; walk with
my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open
windows, up to which China-roses climb, with my pipe, while the
blackbirds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the
nightingale to have the neighbourhood to herself. We have had such a
spring (bating the last ten days) as would have satisfied even you with
warmth. And such verdure! white clouds moving over the new-fledged tops
of oak-trees, and acres of grass striving with buttercups. How old to
tell of, how new to see! I believe that Leslie's "Life of Constab