I am glad Morton has taken up painting in good earnest, and I shall encourage him to persevere as much as I can. . . . I have begun to draw a little--the fit comes upon one in summer with the foliage: as to sunshine, so necessary for pictures, I have been obliged to do without that. We have had scarce a ray for a month . . . I have read nothing, except the Annual Register: which is not amiss in a certain state of mind, and is not easily exhausted. A goodly row of some hundred very thick volumes which may be found in every country town wherever one goes forbid all danger of exhaustion. So long as there is appetite, there is food: and of that plain substantial nature which, Johnson says, suits the stomach of middle life. Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one's sonneteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact. Do you know anything of poor Sir Egerton Brydges?--this, in talking of sonnets--poor fellow, he wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire them also. He lived in haughty seclusion, and at the end of life wrote a doating Autobiography. He writes good prose however, and shews himself as he is very candidly: indeed he is proud of the display. All this is not meant to be a lesson to you who write, everybody says, good sonnets. Sir E. Brydges would have been the same dilettante if he had written Epics--probably worse. I certainly don't like sonnets, as you know: we have been spoiled for them by Daddy Wordsworth, ---, and Co. Moxon must write them too forsooth. What do they seem fit for but to serve as little shapes in which a man may mould very mechanically any single thought which comes into his head, which thought is not lyrical enough in itself to exhale in a more lyrical measure? The difficulty of the sonnet metre in English is a good excuse for the dull didactic thoughts which naturally incline towards it: fellows know there is no danger of decanting their muddy stuff ever so slowly: they are neither prose nor poetry. I have rather a wish to tie old Wordsworth's volume about his neck and pitch him into one of the deepest holes of his dear Duddon. But it is very stupid to write all this to Italy, though it would have done very well to have canvassed with you and Morton over our pipes in Mornington Crescent. I suppose you never will come back to stay long in England again: I have given you up to a warmer latitude. If you were more within reach, I would make you go a trip with me to the West of Ireland, whither I am not confident enough to go alone. Yet I wish to see it. _To Bernard Barton_. EDGEWORTHSTOWN, _September_ 2/41. MY DEAR BARTON,