I wish you would write to me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I
suppose, at Cambridge: and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a
shame) here: so that I hear of nobody--except that Spedding and I abuse
each other about Shakespeare occasionally: a subject on which you must
know that he has lost his conscience, if ever he had any. For what did
Dr. Allen . . . say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his
bumps were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety--then what
would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q. E. D.
Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of
conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also
where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes,
the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly
compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that
of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book--the second Funeral
of Napoleon? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it: as
each copy sold puts 7.5_d._ in T.'s pocket: which is very empty just now,
I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done. What an
account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last Review, {80a}
the last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe but Jack
himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The electric eel
at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth fires away
about the Odes of Pindar, {80b} and Donne is very aesthetic about Mr.
Hallam's Book. {80c} What is the meaning of 'exegetical'? Till I know
that, how can I understand the Review?
Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates as
I knew in the days before they 'assumed the purple.' I am reading
Gibbon, and see nothing but this d---d colour before my eyes. It changes
occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in
China, and also the antithesis to purple (_vide_ Coleridge and Eastlake's
Goethe)--even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and
yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (_vide_ Coleridge,
etc.) Is this aesthetic? is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you
can assure me that it is. But, nonsense apart and begged-pardon-for,
pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place.
'The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay: with a subsoil or pan
of an adhesive silicious brick formation: adapted to the growth of wheat,
beans, and clover--requiring however a summer fallow (as is generally
stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc.' This is not an
unpleasing style on Agricultural subjects--nor an uncommon one.
_To F. Tennyson_.
BOULGE HALL, WOODBRIDGE.
[21 March, 1841.]