! I must think the 'Woman in White,' with her
Count Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads Miss Austen at
night after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him, like Gruel:
or like Paisiello's Music, which Napoleon liked above all other, because
he said it didn't interrupt his Thoughts.

WOODBRIDGE, _Dec._ 29 [1871].

MY DEAR POLLOCK,

If you come here, come some very fine weather, when we look at our best
inland, and you may take charge of my Boat on the River. I doubt I did
my Eyes damage this Summer by steering in the Sun, and peering out for
the Beacons that mark the Channel; but your Eyes are proof against this,
and I shall resign the command to you, as you wrote that you liked it at
Clovelly. . . .

I had thought Beauty was the main object of the Arts: but these people,
not having Genius, I suppose, to create any new forms of that, have
recourse to the Ugly, and find their Worshippers in plenty. In Poetry,
Music, and Painting, it seems to me the same. And people think all this
finer than Mozart, Raffaelle, and Tennyson--as he _was_--but he never
ceases to be noble and pure. There was a fine passage quoted from his
Last Idyll: about a Wave spending itself away on a long sandy Shore: that
was Lincolnshire, I know.

Carlyle has written to remind me of putting up a Stone on the spot in
Naseby field where I dug up the Dead for him thirty years ago. I will
gladly have the Stone cut, and the Inscription he made for it engraved:
but will I go again to Northamptonshire to see it set up? And perhaps
the people there have forgotten all about the place, now that a whole
Generation has passed away, and improved Farming has passed the Plough
over the Ground. But we shall see.

_To W. A. Wright_.

WOODBRIDGE, _Jan._ 20/72.

By way of flourishing my Eyes, I have been looking into Andrew Marvell,
an old favourite of mine, who led the way for Dryden in Verse, and Swift
in Prose, and was a much better fellow than the last, at any rate.

Two of his lines in the Poem on 'Appleton House,' with its Gardens,
Grounds, etc., run:

But most the _Hewel's_ wonders are,
Who here has the Holtseltster's care.

The '_Hewel_' being evidently the Woodpecker, who, by tapping the Trees,
etc., does the work of one who measures and gauges Timber; here, rightly
or wrongly, called '_Holtseltster_.' 'Holt' one knows: but what is
'seltster'? I do not find either this word or 'Hewel' in Bailey or
Halliwell