My dear good Allen,
Let me hear from you, if even but a line, before you leave London on your summer excursion, whithersoever that is to be. I conclude you go somewhere; to Hampshire, or to Tenby. . . .
I have nothing to tell you of myself. Here I exist, and read scraps of books, garden a little, and am on good terms with my neighbours. The Times paper is stirring up our farming society to the root, and some good will come of it, I dare say, and some ill. Do you know of any good books on Education? not for the poor or Charity schools, but on modern Gentlemen’s grammar schools, etc. Did not Combe
write a book? But he is the driest Scotch Snuff. I beg leave to say that this letter is written with a pen of my own making: the first I have made these twenty years. I doubt after all it is no proof of a very intelligent pen-Creator, but only of a lucky slit. The next effort shall decide. Farewell, my dear Fellow. Don’t forget unworthy me. We shall soon have known each other twenty years, and soon thirty, and forty, if we live a little while.
To Bernard Barton.
Geldestone, 22 August 1844.
My dear Barton,
You will think I have forgot you. I spent four pleasant days with Donne: who looks pale and thin, and in whose face the grey is creeping up from those once flourishing whiskers to the skull. It is doing so with me. We are neither of us in what may be called the first dawn of boyhood. Donne maintains his shape better than I do, but sorrow I doubt has done that: and so we see why the house of mourning is better than the stalled ox. For it is a grievous thing to grow poddy: the age of Chivalry is gone then. An old proverb says that ‘a full belly neither fights nor flies well.’
I also saw Geldart at Norwich. He paints, and is deep in religious thoughts also: he has besides the finest English good sense about him: and altogether
he is a man one goes to that one may learn from him. I walked much about Norwich and was pleased with the old place.