The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else can give us a piece of land at all, but must sell it us. Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up, is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere with their business? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own? Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so. I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would do his share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.