I rely on you and all your family sympathizing in this. So do I sometimes: anyhow, people complimenting each other on the approach of Spring and such like felicitations are very tiresome. Our very year is of a paltry diameter. But this is not proper language for Mark Tapley, whose greatest bore just now is having a bad pen; but the letter is ended. So he is jolly and yours as ever. _To S. Laurence_. BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE, _Decr_. 21/43. MY DEAR LAURENCE, I hope you got safe and sound to London: as I did to this place yesterday. Those good Tetter people! I have got an attachment to them somehow. I left Jane {146b} in a turmoil as to which picture of W[ilkinson] she was to take. I advised her to take a dose of Time, which always operates so gently. I have been down to Woodbridge to-day and had a long chat with Churchyard, whom I wish you had seen, as also his Gainsborough sketches. He is quite clear as to Gainsborough's general method, which was (he says) to lay all in (except the sky, of course) with pure colour, quite unmixed with white. The sketch he has is certainly so; but whether it ever could have been wrought up into a deep finish, I don't know. C. says yes it could: that Gainsborough began nearly all his pictures so. He has tried it over and over again (he says) and produced exactly the same effect with pure colour, laid on very thin over a light brown ground: asphaltum and blue producing just such a green as many of the trees in this sketch are of. The sky put in afterwards. He thinks this the great secret of landscape painting. He shewed me the passage quoted by Burnet {147} from Rubens' maxims (where and what are they?) 'Begin by painting in your shadows lightly, taking care that _no_ white be suffered to glide into them--_it is the poison of a picture except in the lights_. If ever your shadows are corrupted by the introduction of this baneful colour, your tones will no longer be warm and transparent, but heavy and leaden. It is not the same in the lights: they may be loaded with colour as much as you think proper.' Here is a technical letter, you see, from a man who is no artist, and very ignorant, as you think, I dare say. Try a head in this way. You have tried a dozen, you say. Very well then. I will send up your cloak, which is barely bigger than a fig leaf, when I can. On Saturday I give supper to B. Barton and Churchyard. I wish you could be with us. We are the chief wits of Woodbridge. And one man has said that he envies our conversations! So we flatter each other in the country. * * * * * Of FitzGerald's way of life at this time I have the following notes which were given me by the late Rev. George Crabbe, Rector of Merton, the grandson of the poet, at whose house he died.