MY DEAR MR. CHURCH,--Since I heard, which I did first from Mr. Clough,[23] that you were about to marry and take charge of a parish, I have been longing every time I wrote to England to add a line expressing my most sincere congratulations. I hope you will not think me too presuming if I make bold to do so, and if I ask you where your parish is, for I would gladly form some idea of where your home is to be. Pleasant and desirable on many accounts as an Oxford life must be, yet I cannot but think you more appropriately placed in the pleasant parsonage I can fancy, the centre of a little world of your own, and the spiritual guide of an attached body of parishioners, where you will be very happy and very useful. Still let us hope that the visit to Cambridge, New England, is only deferred, to afford us a double gratification. I think you can sometimes leave your parish for three months, or even more with special leave, and the voyage is becoming shorter and cheaper every year. I have looked through the “Times,” which I see regularly through the kindness of a friend, thinking that I might perchance see your appointment, presentation, or whatever it may be, mentioned; but in vain. By the way, I am glad to see that you have elected Mr. Gladstone. Your name on the Oxford Committee makes me suppose you have not yet left Oxford. Dr. Albro has returned in restored health, and speaks with much gratification of his visit to Oxford, only regretting that your absence prevented his making your acquaintance until the last moment of his short stay. Mr. Clough brought me a letter from Maskelyne of Wadham College. Circumstances, I am sorry to say, have yet prevented me from seeing him here as much as I could wish. I hope soon to know him better. He has excellent and influential acquaintances; but one hardly sees what he is to do. If he holds Unitarian views, as I have been told, he will perhaps be more favorably situated, just in Boston or Cambridge, than in England, and probably meet more cultivated and more religious people of that persuasion than at home. But if he sympathizes rather with Francis Newman and that school, as some one tells me, I should think he would not find that class of people here very attractive to him. But I hope that is not his bent. I have no partiality for Unitarianism, though it is the faith of near and valued friends. I am an orthodox Presbyterian, as my fathers were. But in England I should be a Churchman, although a pretty low one, at least in some respects; and I am a most hearty well-wisher to the Church of England. So pray, when settled in your parish, just drop me a line to say where you are, and how old your parish church is; for hankering after antiquities is, as an Oxford man told me, a great failing of Americans. TO A. DE CANDOLLE. CAMBRIDGE, March 28, 1853.