In connection with these journals, I have been specially requested to add to the above this record following (dated forty-four years ago) as a specimen of my letter-writing in old days:  it has pen-and-ink sketches, here inserted by way of rough and ready illustration.  The whole letter is printed in its integrity as desired, and tells its own archaeological tale, though rather voluminously; but in the prehistoric era before Rowland Hill arose, to give us cheap stamps for short notes, it was an economy to make a letter as long as possible to pay for its exorbitant postage:  for example, my letters to and from Oxford used to cost eightpence—­or double if in an envelope, then absurdly surcharged.

My Cornish Expedition.

     [Illustration:  [The Arms of Cornwall]

     8th and 9th of January 1840.

     “FOR ONE AND ALL”]

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     My Dear Mother, and all good Domiciliars,—­

I suppose it to be the intention of our worshipful and right bankrupt Government that everybody write to everybody true, full, and particular accounts of all things which he, she, or it, may have done, be doing, or be about to do; and seeing I may have something to say which will interest you all, I fulfil the gossiping intentions of the Collective Wisdom, and give you an omnibus epistle.  Now, I recommend a good map, a quiet mind, and as Charley says, Atten_tion_.—­The bright, clear, frosty morning of the 8th found me at Devonport, and nine o’clock beheld the same egregious individual, well-benjamined, patronising with his bodily presence the roof of the Falmouth coach.  A steam ferry-bridge took us across the Hamoaze, which, with its stationed hulks, scattered shipping, and town and country banks, made, as it always makes, a beautiful landscape.  At Torpoint we first encountered venerable Cornwall; and a pretty drive of sixteen miles, well wooded, and watered by several intrusions of the unsatisfied sea, brought coach and contents to Liskeard, a clean, granite, country town, with palatial inn, and (in common with the whole of Devonshire and Cornwall) a large many gabled church, covered with carved cathedral windows, and shadowed by ancient elms.  Not being able to accomplish everything, I heard of, but saw not, divers antiquities in the distant neighbourhood of St. Clare, such as a circle of stones, an old church and well, and the natural curiosity called the cheese-ring, being a mass of layered granite capriciously decomposed:  these “unseen ones” (what a mysterious name for a three-volumed Bentleyism!) I do not regret, for I know how to appreciate those wonders, the only enchantment whereof is, distance.  So suffered I conveyance to Lostwithiel, a town lying in a hollow under the pictorial auspices of Restormel Castle, whose ivied ruins up the valley are fine and Raglandish:  while the rest were bolting a coach dinner, I betook me to ye church, and was