dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus regit artus,” which, considering that the English of his correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar, and often in spelling, might be taken as a proof of how much he “idealised his Molly;” and, as Miss Jenkyns used to say, “People talk a great deal about idealising now-a-days, whatever that may mean.”  But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry which soon seized him, in which his Molly figured away as “Maria.”  The letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her, “Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband.  I thowt to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait.  Mem., to send the poetry to Sir Peter Arley, as my husband desires.”  And in a post-scriptum note in his handwriting it was stated that the Ode had appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1782.

Her letters back to her husband (treasured as fondly by him as if they had been M. T. Ciceronis Epistolae) were more satisfactory to an absent husband and father than his could ever have been to her.  She told him how Deborah sewed her seam very neatly every day, and read to her in the books he had set her; how she was a very “forrard,” good child, but would ask questions her mother could not answer, but how she did not let herself down by saying she did not know, but took to stirring the fire, or sending the “forrard” child on an errand.  Matty was now the mother’s darling, and promised (like her sister at her age), to be a great beauty.  I was reading this aloud to Miss Matty, who smiled and sighed a little at the hope, so fondly expressed, that “little Matty might not be vain, even if she were a bewty.”

“I had very pretty hair, my dear,” said Mist Matilda; “and not a bad mouth.”  And I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself up.

But to return to Mrs Jenkyns’s letters.  She told her husband about the poor in the parish; what homely domestic medicines she had administered; what kitchen physic she had sent.  She had evidently held his displeasure as a rod in pickle over the heads of all the ne’er-do-wells.  She asked for his directions about the cows and pigs; and did not always obtain them, as I have shown before.

The kind old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born, soon after the publication of the sermon; but there was another letter of exhortation from the grandfather, more stringent and admonitory than ever, now that there was a boy to be guarded from the snares of the world.  He described all the various sins into which men might fall, until I wondered how any man ever came to a natural death.  The gallows seemed as if it must have been the termination of the lives of most of the grandfather’s friends and acquaintance; and I was not surprised at the way in which he spoke of this life being “a vale of tears.”

It seemed curious that I should never have heard of this brother before; but I concluded that he had died young, or else surely his name would have been alluded to by his sisters.