. . . You may infer that I have been reading--yes, and with great Interest, however little Scholarship--your Fellow-Collegian's new Book of Notes, etc. {238} And just as I had done my best with his Catullus, came to hand the Love-Letters of a kindred Spirit, Keats; whose peevish Jealousy might, two thousand years ago, have made him as bitter and indecent against his friend Armitage Brown, as Catullus against Caesar. But in him too Malice was not stronger than Love, any more than in Catullus; not only of the Lesbia-Brawne, but of the Fraternal, kind. Keats sighs after 'Poor Tom' as well as he whose 'Frater ave atque vale' continues sighing down to these times. (I hope I don't misquote, more Hibernorum.) That is a fine Figure of old Caesar entertaining his Lampooner at the Feast. And I have often thought what a pretty picture, for Millais to do, of the Child Keats keeping guard outside his sick Mother's Chamber with a drawn Sword. If Catullus, however, were only _Fescennining_, his 'Malice' was not against Caesar, but against the Nemesis that might else be revenged on him--eh? But I don't understand how Suetonius, or those he wrote for, could have forgotten, though for party purposes they may have ignored, the nature and humour of that _Fescennine_ which is known to Scholars two thousand years after. How very learned, and probably all wrong, have I become, since becoming interested in this Book! WOODBRIDGE. _March_ 21 [1878]. MY DEAR WRIGHT, . . . The Enclosed only adds a little to the little Paper of _Data_: {239} you may care to add so much in better MS. than mine to the leaves I sent you. Those leaves were more intended for such an Edition of the Letters in batches, as now edited; and, as many of them are private right, _so_ edited they must continue for some time, I suppose. An odd coincidence happened only yesterday about them. I was looking to Lamb's Letter to Manning of Feb. 26, 1808, where he extols Braham, the Singer, who (he says) led his Spirit 'as the Boys follow Tom the Piper.' I had not thought who Tom was: rather acquiesced in some idea of the 'pied Piper of Hamelin'; and, not half an hour after, chancing to take down Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, {240a} found Tom against the Maypole, with a ring of Dancers about him. I suppose Tom survived in '_Folk lore_' . . . till dear Lamb's time: but how he, a Cockney, knew of it, I don't know. I was looking for Keats (when I happened on Browne) to find the passage you quote {240b}: but (of course) I could not find the Book I wanted. Nor can I construe him any more than so much of Shakespeare: whether from the negligent hurry of both (Johnson says Shakespeare often contented himself with a halfborn expression), or from some Printer's error. The meaning is clear enough to me, if I conjecture the context right; and more so to you, I dare say. The passage is one of those bad ones, except the first line, which he afterwards repeated, mutatis mutandis,