[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]

I wish you would write me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I suppose, at Cambridge, and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a shame!) here; so that I hear of nobody—except that Spedding and I abuse each other about Shakespeare occasionally, a subject on which you must know that he has lost his conscience, if he ever had any. For what did Dr. Allen … say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his bumps were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety—then what would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q.E.D.

Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes, the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book—"The Second Funeral of Napoleon"? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it, as each copy sold puts 7-1/2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done. What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last Review! The last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth fires away about the Odes of Pindar, and Donne is very æsthetic about Mr. Hallam's book. What is the meaning of "exegetical"? Till I know that, how can I understand the Review?

Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates as I knew in the days before they "assumed the purple." I am reading Gibbon, and see nothing but this d——d colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (vide Coleridge and Eastlake's "Goethe")—even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (vide Coleridge, etc.). Is this æsthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay, with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover—requiring, however, a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc." This is not an unpleasing style on agricultural subjects—nor an uncommon one….

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You know my way of life so well that I need not describe it to you, as it has undergone no change since I saw you. I read of mornings—the same old books over and over again, having no command of new ones; walk with my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open windows, up to which China-roses climb, with my pipe, while the blackbirds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the nightingale to have the neighbourhood to herself. We have had such a spring (bating the last ten days) as would have satisfied even you with warmth. And such verdure! white clouds moving over the new-fledged tops of oak-trees, and acres of grass striving with buttercups. How old to tell of, how new to see! I believe that Leslie's "Life of Constable" (a very charming book) has given me a fresh love of spring. Constable loved it above all seasons: he hated autumn. When Sir G. Beaumont, who was of the old classical taste, asked him if he did not find it difficult to place his brown tree in his pictures, "Not at all," said C, "I never put one in at all." And when Sir George was crying up the tone of the old masters' landscapes, and quoting an old violin as the proper tone of colour for a picture, Constable got up, took an old Cremona, and laid it down on the sunshiny grass. You would like the book. In defiance of all this, I have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles indeed; but I agree with Sir George and Constable both. I like pictures that are not like nature. I can have nature better than any picture by looking out of my window. Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to the freshness of earth and sky. Constable did not wholly achieve what he tried at: and perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things as more within the compass of lead paint. To paint dew with lead!…

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It is now the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate east wind, all razors; a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London, with 365 blades all drawn and pointed. The wheat is all sown; the fallows cannot be ploughed. What are all the poor folks to do during the winter? And they persist in having the same enormous families they used to do; a woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children! What farmers are to employ all these? What landlord can find room for them? The law of Generation must be repealed….

DEAR CARLYLE,
[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]

I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or worth putting you to the trouble of answering me. About twice in a year, however, I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered, how you and Mrs. Carlyle are? And yet, perhaps, it is not so easy for you to tell me so much about yourself: for your "well-being" comprises a good deal! That you are not carried off by the cholera I take for granted, since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy with Doctor Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in Westminster Abbey, by the side of Wilberforce perhaps! Besides, a short note from Thackeray a few weeks ago told me you had been to see him. I conclude also from this that you have not been a summer excursion of any distance.