n to yourself, or your Mother, I did not
choose to trouble you with any of my own feelings about your Uncle's
Death. But I am not sorry to take this opportunity of saying, and, I
know, truly, there was no one I loved and honoured more; that, though I
had not seen him for more than twenty years, I was always thinking of him
all the while: always feeling that I could apply to him for a wise word I
needed for myself; always knowing that I might light upon some wiser word
than any one else's in some Review, etc., and _now_ always thinking I
have lost all that. I say that I have not known, no, nor heard of, any
mortal so prepared to step unchanged into the better world we are
promised--Intellect, and Heart, and such an outer Man to them as I
remember.

WOODBRIDGE: _July_ 31, [1881].

. . . I rejoice to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his stray works.
. . . I used to say he wrote 'Virgilian Prose.' One only of his I did
not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the subject, not of
the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he made in what was
called the 'Quinquaginta Club' Debating Society (not the Union) at
Cambridge about the year 1831. This Speech his Father got him to recall
and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son should turn his
faculties to such public Topics rather than to the Poets, of whom he had
seen enough in Cumberland not to have much regard for: Shelley, for one,
at one time stalking about the mountains, with Pistols, and other such
Vagaries. I do not think he was much an Admirer of Wordsworth (I don't
know about Southey), and I well remember that when I was at M_e_rehouse
(as Miss Bristowe would have us call it) with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr.
Spedding grudged his Son's giving up much time and thought to
consultations about Morte d'Arthur's, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were
then in MS. He more than once questioned me, who was sometimes present
at the meetings: 'Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and
Jem criticizes:--is that it?' etc. This, while I might be playing Chess
with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing outside
the Hall door.

_To C. E. Norton_.

WOODBRIDGE. _August_ 5/81.

MY DEAR NORTON,

I am sorry that you felt bound to write me so fully about the Play when,
as you tell me, you had so much other work on your hands. Any how, do
not trouble yourself to write more. If you think my Version does as
well, or bett