The Elizabethan apartment is finished and furnished. Esta casa esta muy a la disposicion de V.E. y de mi Señora (cuyos pies beso) la Esposa de V.E. I beg you will speak kindly of me to your fair bride, as I am anxious to stand well in her opinion. I have had the good fortune hitherto to have lost neither of two old friends who have recently married.
If your Reading plan fails, there are really some very nice places within 5 and 8 miles of Exon, cheap and delightful. You can make the place your headquarters, if you have a fancy to look for habitations amid the green valleys of Devon.
So, with the best and sincerest wishes for the unmixed and long happiness of Bride and Bridegroom, and it can hardly fail to be so, believe me,
Ever most truly yours,
Richard Ford.
Addington was married on November 17th, 1836, to Eleanor Anne, eldest daughter of T. G. Bucknall Estcourt, M.P. Meanwhile Heavitree rapidly approached completion. Three weeks later Ford announces (December 9th, 1836) that his house was ready. “Heavitree,” he says, “is finished and furnished, and really is a little gem in its way. The Episcopus has been to dine here, and, as he dines nowhere, it is rather an honour and has infused an odour of sanctity over my cell.”
It is not perhaps singular, after so long a devotion to building, that the first article which Ford contributed to the Quarterly Review should have been dedicated to “Cob Walls.” The substance of the article seems from the following letter (February 27th, 1837) to have been a paper read before the Exeter Athenæum. Among the audience was William Nassau Senior, whose praise led Lockhart to ask to publish it in the Quarterly.
Cob, depend upon it, is indestructible. I am about next week to read a learned paper on that very subject at the Athenæum, which I will send you, with a chapter on Spanish Comedy.
The house at Heavitree is now in really a very habitable state, and the gardens beginning to put on their spring livery. I was heartily glad to get out of that plague-stricken, foggy, heart-and-soul-withering city of London, where I was detained more than a month by the illness of my boy, who is still far from well and unable to return to his tutor. I am occupied in the parental task of teaching him chess and the Greek alphabet. I saw very few of our mutual friends in London, as I was, like the rest of mankind, under the lowering influenza.
I have no news here,—leading a humdrum life amid my flowers and books, with a clean tongue and dirty hands, oblitus et obliviscendus.