Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

Lancaster:  March 24, 1829.

My dear Father,—­A single line to say that I am at Lancaster.  Where you all are I have not the very slightest notion.  Pray let me hear.  That dispersion of the Gentiles which our friends the prophets foretell seems to have commenced with our family.

Everything here is going on in the common routine.  The only things of peculiar interest are those which we get from the London papers.  All minds seem to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emancipation having come at last.  The feeling of approbation among the barristers is all but unanimous.  The quiet townspeople here, as far as I can see, are very well contented.  As soon as I arrived I was asked by my landlady how things had gone.  I told her the division, which I had learned from Brougham at Garstang.  She seemed surprised at the majority.  I asked her if she was against the measure.  “No; she only wished that all Christians would live in peace and charity together.”  A very sensible speech, and better than one at least of the members for the county ever made in his life.

I implore you above everything, my dear Father, to keep up your health and spirits.  Come what may, the conveniences of life, independence, our personal respectability, and the exercise of the intellect and the affections, we are almost certain of retaining; and everything else is a mere superfluity, to be enjoyed, but not to be missed.  But I ought to be ashamed of reading you a lecture on qualities which you are so much more competent to teach than myself.

Ever yours very affectionately

T. B. M.

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

50 Great Ormond Street, London: 

January 25, 1830.

My dear Sir,—­I send off by the mail of to-day an article on
Southey,—­too long, I fear, to meet your wishes, but as short as
I could make it.

There were, by the bye, in my last article a few omissions made, of no great consequence in themselves; the longest, I think, a paragraph of twelve or fourteen lines.  I should scarcely have thought this worth mentioning, as it certainly by no means exceeds the limits of that editorial prerogative which I most willingly recognise, but that the omissions seemed to me, and to one or two persons who had seen the article in its original state, to be made on a principle which, however sound in itself, does not I think apply to compositions of this description.  The passages omitted were the most pointed and ornamented sentences in the review.  Now, for high and grave works, a history for example, or a system of political or moral philosophy, Doctor Johnson’s rule,—­that every sentence which the writer thinks fine ought to be cut out,—­is excellent.  But periodical works like ours, which unless they strike at the first reading are not likely to strike at all, whose whole life is a month or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even viciously florid.  Probably, in estimating the real value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, you and I should not materially differ.  But it is not by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the angler is determined in his choice of bait.