occasion, describing, in a letter to Walpole, the uncle and the place thus: "The description of a road that your coach-wheels have so often honored, it is needless to give to you; suffice it that I arrived safe at my uncle's, who is a great hunter in imagination. His dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand up at this present writing; and though the gout forbids his galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My comfort amid all this is, that I have, at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest--the vulgar call it a common--all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds: 'And as they bow, their hoary tops relate, In murmuring sounds, the dark decrees of Fate; While visions, as poetic eyes avow, Cling to each leaf and swarm on every bough.' At the foot of one of these squats me I, _il penseroso_, and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace--aloud, too; that is, talk to you; but I do not remember that I ever heard you answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself, but it is entirely your own fault. We have old Mr. Southern at a gentleman's house a little way off, who often comes to see us. He is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory, but is as agreeable as an old man can be--at least I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oronoko."