poor father jumped, and clapped his hands, and kissed the letter, like a child; as my mother says, “I am glad he has one gleam of sunshine, at least;” he sadly wanted it, and I know nothing that could have given him so much pleasure.  Pray tell my aunt Kemble of it.  I dare say she will be glad to hear it. [My brother’s tutor was Mr. Peacock, the celebrated mathematician, well known at Cambridge as one of the most eminent members of the university, and a private tutor of whom all his pupils were deservedly proud; even those who, like my brother John, cultivated the classical studies in preference to the severe scientific subjects of which Mr. Peacock was so illustrious a master.  His praise of my brother was regretful, though most ungrudging, for his own sympathy was entirely with the intellectual pursuits for which Cambridge was peculiarly famous, as the mathematical university, in contradistinction to the classical tendency supposed to prevail at this time among the teachers and students of Oxford.]

And now let me thank you for your last long letter, and the detailed criticism it contained of my lines; if they oftener passed through such a wholesome ordeal, I should probably scribble less than I do.  You ask after my novel of “Francoise de Foix,” and my translation of Sismondi’s History; the former may, perhaps, be finished some time these next six years; the latter is, and has been, in Dr. Malkin’s hands ever since I left Heath Farm.  What you say of scriptural subjects I do not always think true; for instance, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,” does not appear to me to have lost much beauty by Byron’s poetical paraphrase.  We are really going to leave this pleasant place, and take up our abode in Westminster; how I shall regret my dear little room, full of flowers and books, and with its cheerful view.  Enfin il n’y faut plus penser.  I have, luckily, the faculty of easily accommodating myself to circumstances, and though sorry to leave my little hermitage, I shall soon take root in the next place.  With all my dislike to moving, my great wish is to travel; but perhaps that is not an absolute inconsistency, for what I wish is never to remain long enough in a place to take root, or, having done so, never to be transplanted.  I am writing a journal, and its pages, like our many pleasant hours of conversation, are a whimsical medley of the sad, the sober, the gay, the good, the bad, and the ridiculous; not at all the sort of serious, solemn journal you would write.

                                   CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, ——­, 1827. 
     MY DEAREST H——­: 

I am afraid you are wondering once more whether I have the gout in my hands; but so many circumstances have latterly arisen to occupy my time and attention that I have had but little leisure for letter-writing.  You are now once more comfortably re-established in your little turret chamber [Miss S——­’s room in her home, Ardgillan Castle], which I