To S. Laurence.
Market hill: Woodbridge.
Jan. 13/70.
My dear Laurence,
Can you tell me (in a line) how I should treat some old Pictures of mine which have somehow got rusty with the mixt damp and then fires (I suppose) of my new house, which, after being built at near double its proper cost, is just what I do not want, according to the usage of the Ballyblunder Family, of which I am a very legitimate offshoot?
If you were down here, I think I should make you take a life-size Oil Sketch of the Head and Shoulders of my Captain of the Lugger. You see by the enclosed that these are neither of them of a bad sort: and the Man’s Soul is every way as well proportioned, missing in nothing that may become A Man, as I believe. He and I will, I doubt, part Company; well as he likes me, which is perhaps as well as a sailor cares for any one but Wife and
Children: he likes to be, what he is born to be, his own sole Master, of himself, and of other men. So now I have got him a fair start, I think he will carry on the Lugger alone: I shall miss my Hobby, which is no doubt the last I shall ride in this world: but I shall also get eased of some Anxiety about the lives of a Crew for which I now feel responsible. And this last has been a Year of great Anxiety in this respect.
I had to run to London for one day about my Eyes (which, you see by my MS., are not in prime order at all) and saw a Sir Joshua at a Framer’s window, and brought it down. The face faded, but elegant and lady-like always; the dress in colour quite Venetian. It was in Leicester Square; I can’t think how all the world of Virtuosos kept passing and would not give twenty pounds for it. But you don’t rate Sir Joshua in comparison with Gainsboro’.
Woodbridge: Jan. 20/70.
My dear Laurence,
. . . My Captain lives at Lowestoft, and is there at present: he also in anxiety about his Wife who was brought to bed the very same day my Landlady died, and (as a letter from him this morning tells me) has a hard time of it. I should certainly like a large Oil-sketch, like Thackeray’s, done in your most hasty, and worst, style, to hang up with Thackeray and Tennyson, with whom he shares a certain Grandeur of Soul and Body. As you guess, the