My dear John Allen,
. . . I am much entêté at present about one Matthews, [122] a preacher at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to Chartists, etc. If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him. I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford. All this you will think absurd; and so perhaps it is.
I have been reading Stobæus’ Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all I have looked at all this summer.
Bedford, August 29/42.
My dearest Fellow,
Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure. An old acquaintance is not the
worse for its wear, I think. This very time ten years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees’ boarding-house at Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man [123] at whose house I am now staying:—then a boy of sixteen. He is now a man of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September than on anything else in the world. I see very little of him. . . .
I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of Stobæus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and a little Dante and a little Shakespeare. But the great secret of all is the not eating meat. To that the world must come, I am sure. Only it makes one grasshopper foolish. I also receive letters from Morton and F. Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read. They came all of a sudden on Cicero’s villa—one of them at least, the Formian—with a mosaic pavement leading thro’ lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain as old as the Augustan age bubbling up as fresh, Tennyson says, ‘as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator as he sate there in the stillness of the noon day, devoting the siesta-hours to study.’ When I first read of these things I wish to see them; but, on reflection, I am sure I see them much better in such letters as these.
I have seen one good picture about here: a
portrait of O. Cromwell by Lely—so said—unlike other Lelys, but very carefully painted: and, I should think, an original portrait. . . I also read Hayley’s Life of Romney the other day. Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter: but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and, because Sir Joshua and others had said that marriage spoilt an artist, almost immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw her till the end of his life: when, old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him, and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney’s pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am sure.