"How extraordinary you must have thought my silence, after your kind letter from this place. Perhaps you imputed it to illness. That is not true. Yet it may be called half true: for illness of my wife is one topic, and increased weakness makes me slower in the smallest matters—such as handling a book, or duly buttoning a shirt or coat: while I have been dealing with proof-sheets from always two printers, sometimes four. My day is cut short at each end—for in the colder months I cannot sit at my desk until my fire is lighted, and my eyes are wearied before evening candlelight. Meanwhile my unwilling correspondence has rather increased than lessened….
"I am achieving a long hoped for work, in which of course I have to pay the printers—i.e. to leave in some connective available form whatever miscellaneous important printing I have ever published, ethico-political, theological, economical, historical, aesthetic, critical, mathematical: indeed, the mathematical is all new, not reprint.
"I take as vivid an interest in all that concerns public welfare, of England, Ireland, and foreign countries, and hope I ever shall. More than ever I see that our best work for God is to work for God's creatures, not excluding gentle brutes.
"Is it possible that you are even now here? That would be very good news.
"Your lazy friend, with much apology,
"F. W. Newman."
"Northam, near Bideford, "19th May, 1890.
"My dear Friend,
"Your two letters were indeed doubly welcome, and brought me virtual pardon for two neglects, of which the worst was, the keeping locked up (and still in prison!) the letters which you bade me to return…
"The chief want of Cornwall, I was told by an old resident, is soil; the rock is too near the surface. Herein art will do much in a few generations. Attica and Palestine—stony soils—bore plentiful pine fruit. Our Channel Islands utter the same thing. In England the landlord is the effectual starver of the soil. Bishop Stubbs, a first-rate authority on agriculture, explains the immense excess of crops raised acre by acre under peasant culture, 'because the farmers' land is labour-starved.'"