As I send these last sheets to press, I get from the Cheap-Fuel
Supply Association, Limited, a letter advising me that the Right
Hon. Lord Claud Hamilton, M.P., and the late Director of Stores at
the War Office, and Michael Angelo, Esq., of St. James's Square,
and the late Controller of Military Finance in Calcutta, with other
estimable persons, are about to undertake the manufacture of peat
into cheap fuel, for the public benefit; and promise a net profit
on the operation, of six shillings and sixpence a ton; of which I
am invited to secure my share. The manufacture of peat into portable
fuel may, or may not, be desirable; that depends on what the British
public means to do after they have burnt away all their bituminous and
boggy ground in driving about at forty miles an hour, and making iron
railings, and other such valuable property, for the possession of their
posterity. But granting the manufacture desirable, and omitting all
reference to its effect on the picturesque, why Lord Claud Hamilton
and Michael Angelo, Esq., should offer me, a quiet Oxford student,
any share of their six-and-sixpences, I can't think. I could not cut a
peat if they would give me six-and-sixpence the dozen--I know nothing
about its manufacture. What on earth do they propose to pay me for?
The following letter from an old friend, whose manner of life, like
my own, has been broken up, (when it was too late to mend it again,)
by modern improvements, will be useful to me for reference in what
I have to say in my January letter:--
"About myself--ere long I shall be driven out of my house, the
happiest refuge I ever nested in. It is again, like most old rooms,
very lofty, is of wood and plaster, evidently of the Seventh Harry's
time, and most interesting in many ways. It belonged to the Radcliffe
family,--some branch, as I understand, from the scanty information I
can scrape, of the Derwentwater family. Lord ---- owns it now, or did
till lately; for I am informed he has sold it and the lands about it
to an oil-cloth company, who will start building their factory behind
it shortly, and probably resell the land they do not use, with the
hall, to be demolished as an incumbrance that does not pay. Already
the 'Egyptian plague of bricks' has alighted on its eastern side,
devouring every green blade. Where the sheep fed last year, five
streets of cheap cottages--one brick thick in the walls--(for the
factory operatives belonging to two great cotton mills near) are
in course of formation--great cartloads of stinking oyster-shells
having been laid for their foundations; and the whole vicinity on
the eastern side, in a state of mire and débris of broken bricks and
slates, is so painful to my eyes that I scarce ever go out in daylight.
"Fifteen years ago a noble avenue of sycamores led to the hall,
and a large wood covered the surface of an extensive plateau of red
sandstone, and a moat surrounded the walls of the hall. Not a tree
stands now, the moat is filled up, and the very rock itself is riddled
into sand, and is being now carted away."