‘Αἰνότατε: I have been long intending to thank you for your benevolent instructions, which (I don’t know whether I ought to be ashamed or not in confessing it) answered a purpose different from what they were intended for; viz., they convinced me and (what was more to the point) my father, that I knew so little about the matter, and had so little time left, that it was no use to proceed. It certainly was no small satisfaction to me to have so good an excuse for giving up what I had exhausted the entertainment of, and had nothing but the laborious to come. Also, the weather has been so very beautiful this spring, and the delicious blue sky, with hardly a cloud on it for six weeks, so very tempting, that it was hardly possible to help being idle. But somehow my conscience rather misgives me, and what with admonitions now and then from my father, and my lately having taken up with reading sermons, I am become “as melancholy as Moorditch or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”; so that upon the whole I think I must come to you to be prosed and put into a better way…. By the by, I am now officiating as ethical instructor to B[ob?], in which capacity I have been much humiliated at finding how little I know about the matter; but it makes me get them[28] up, which perhaps I should never have done else. I do not think them at all less prosy and long-winded than I used, and I would bet Bishop Butler against all the ‘stotles in the world. Among other things I am also becoming something of a florist, and something of an architect, in which latter I make some proficiency. I am a powerful coadjutor (though I say it that should not say it), in the completion of D[enbury], which bears a different aspect from when you saw it last. It will be a pretty monastic-looking erection, and if we could but make it old, and buy a ghost or two, would be somewhat sentimental. For, thanks to my grandmother’s[29] perverseness, she would not have a new house except in the shape of an old one repaired, which superinduced the necessity of so many crooked little passages and such an irregular exterior, that my father had an excuse for doing what would else have seemed fanciful. Talking about architecture, a new town[30] is going to be built down by Torbay, which is to cut out Brighton and every place. The ground where it is to stand is perfectly unencumbered with houses, and covered with trees, so that there is every advantage at starting; and all will be done on a general plan, so that the buildings shall as little as possible interfere with each other. If you know anyone that wishes for a delightful sea-residence, send him there. You must know you narrowly escaped having a poetical effusion from me the other day. I was out in so magnificent an evening; but being, as you know, a man of few words, I found that by the time I had made my verses scan and construe, they would be so remote from an effusion, at least in the quality of being