excursion of any
distance.

I address from the Rectory (_Vicarage_it ought to be) of Crabbe, the
"Radiator," whose mind is now greatly exercised with Dr. Whewell's
"Plurality of Worlds." Crabbe, who is a good deal in the secrets of
Providence, admires the work beyond measure, but most indignantly
rejects the doctrine as unworthy of God. I have not read the book,
contented to hear Crabbe's commentaries. I have been staying with him
off and on for two months, and, as I say, give his address because any
letter thither directed will find me sooner or later in my little
wanderings. I am at present staying with a farmer in a very pleasant
house near Woodbridge, inhabiting such a room as even you, I think,
would sleep composedly in; my host a taciturn, cautious, honest, active
man whom I have known all my life. He and his wife, a capital housewife,
and his son, who would carry me on his shoulders to Ipswich, and a
maid-servant, who, as she curtsies of a morning, lets fall the teapot,
etc., constitute the household. Farming greatly prospers, farming
materials fetching an exorbitant price at the Michaelmas auctions--all
in defiance of Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who got returned for Suffolk on the
strength of denouncing Corn Law Repeal as the ruin of the country. He
has bought a fine house near Ipswich, with great gilded gates before it,
and, by dint of good dinners and soft sawder, finally draws the country
gentry to him....

Please to look at the September Number of Fraser's Magazine, where there
are some prose translations of Hafiz by Cowell which may interest you a
little. I think Cowell (as he is apt to do) gives Hafiz rather too much
credit for a mystical wine-cup, and cup-bearer; I mean, taking him on
the whole. The few odes he quotes have certainly a deep and pious
feeling, such as the Man of Mirth will feel at times: none perhaps more
strongly.

Some one by chance read out to me the other day at the seaside your
account of poor old Naseby village from "Cromwell," quoted in Knight's
"Half-Hours," etc. It is now twelve years ago, at this very season, I
was ransacking for you; you promising to come down, and never coming. I
hope very much you are soon going to give us something: else Jerrold and
Tupper carry all before them.

TO "LYDIA LANGUISH"
[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]

"Il me faut des emotions"--_Blanche Amory_

You ask me, Lydia, "whether I,
If you refuse my suit, shall die."
(Now pray don't let this