To T. Arnold, Esq.
University Hall: July 23, 1850.
I am rejoiced to find you busy and in mediis rebus so soon. Your population of course won’t be very beautiful and attractive, but all the truer to fact in general for having plenty of alloy, and that is a comfort to a certain extent; earthly paradises being mostly milk-and-watery, and not long to last. Van Diemen’s Land with its convict basis has got at any fate something of the tantum radice ad Tartara, to begin with, and quantum vertice may come. In new colonies, I suppose, no amount of bishops and archdeacons can resist the general indifferentist tendencies of the commercial English middle-class, to whom the world is committed for the present.
I find, meantime, even the small amount of business which I have to do in this place beneficial to me, even the bank-books and cash-accounts.
To J. C. Shairp, Esq.
University Hall: March 9, 1851.
Ex nihilo nihil. He who does not come at all, does not come with goose quills, and à fortiori not with swan quills. Thus the logicians.
You must, therefore, correct your exercises with your own goose feathers. But, tell me. Have you got such big boys this half-year that the ordinary-sized instrument will not apply to their Latin prose? Why don’t you come up here and buy them for yourself?
We are still, I believe, travelling about the sun, round and round, and round and round, in the old foolish fashion. It is certainly a very funny way for the anima mundi to amuse itself. But chacun à son goût. In the midst of life we are in death, for suppose the anima mundi were to take a fancy to do something else, to go backwards and forwards, or even round the other way!
Cudwith, I am told, has an admirable disquisition on ‘A Plastic Nature,’ in a parliamentary sense, I suppose; for otherwise, would it not be pantheism? But indeed that is a mistake, for I hold it to be perfectly constitutional language, entirely in the spirit of our institutions in (Church and State, that is to say) Natural and Revealed Religion. Consider these things; watch and pray, that is the right way, for self and friends, among whom, believe me,