I have just been naming all Mr. Browne's pictures for him. This he has insisted on for three years, and at last this very hot day after an early dinner pens and paper were brought out and I have been writing down awful calumnies about Cuyp, Both, etc. Who could have painted Catharine of Medicis, do you know? We are afraid to call it Vandyke, as he lived (I believe) a century after her: and Mr. B. won't give up its being Catharine's portrait. So here we are in a fix. I went to see Lord Northampton's place Castle Ashby a week ago: expected pictures, and saw very bad ones. The house is very handsome, built by Inigo Jones. I weigh 14 stone--fact. _To John Allen_. [KEYSOE, _August_ 1842.] MY DEAR JOHN ALLEN, . . . I am much _entete_ at present about one Matthews, {122} a preacher at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to Chartists, etc. If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him. I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford. All this you will think absurd; and so perhaps it is. I have been reading Stobaeus' Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all I have looked at all this summer. BEDFORD, _August_ 29/42. MY DEAREST FELLOW, Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure. An old acquaintance is not the worse for its wear, I think. This very time ten years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees' boarding-house at Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man {123} at whose house I am now staying:--then a boy of sixteen. He is now a man of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September than on anything else in the world. I see very little of him. . . . I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of Stobaeus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and a little Dante and a little Shakespeare. But the great secret of all is the not eating meat. To that the world must come, I am sure. Only it makes one grasshopper foolish. I also receive letters from Morton and F. Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read. They came all of a sudden on Cicero's villa--one of them at least, the Formian--with a mosaic pavement leading thro' lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain as old as the Augustan age bubbling up as fresh, Tennyson says, 'as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator as he sate there in the stillness of the noon day, devoting the siesta-hours to study.' When I first read of these things I wish to see them; but, on reflection, I am sure I see them much better in such letters as these.