My Lugger has had (along with her neighbours) such a Season hitherto of Winds as no one remembers. We made 450 pounds in the North Sea; and (just for fun) I did wish to realize 5 pounds in my Pocket. But my Captain would take it all to pay Bills. But if he makes another 400 pounds this Home Voyage! Oh, then we shall have money in our Pockets. I do wish this. For the anxiety about all these People's lives has been so much more to me than all the amusement I have got from the Business, that I think I will draw out of it if I can see my Captain sufficiently firm on his legs to carry it on alone. True, there will then be the same risk to him and his ten men, but they don't care; only I sit here listening to the Winds in the Chimney, and always thinking of the Eleven hanging at my own fingers' ends. This Letter is all desperately about me and mine, Translations and Ships. And now I am going to walk in _my_ Garden: and feed _my_ Captain's Pony with white Carrots; and in the Evening have _my_ Lad come and read for an hour and a half (he stumbles at every third word, and gets dreadfully tired, and so do I; but I renovate him with Cake and Sweet Wine), and I can't just now smoke the Pipe nor drink the Grog. 'These are my Troubles, Mr. Wesley;' {110} but I am still the Master's and Mistress' loyal Servant, EDWARD FITZGERALD. _To E. B. Cowell_. WOODBRIDGE: Tuesday, [28 _Dec._ 1869.] MY DEAR COWELL, Your Letter to day was a real pleasure--nay, a comfort--to me. For I had begun to think that, for whatever reason, you had dropt me; and I know not one of all my friends whom I could less afford to lose. You anticipate rightly all I think of the new Idylls. {111} I had bought the Book at Lowestoft: and when I returned here for Christmas found that A. T.'s Publisher had sent me a Copy. As I suppose this was done by A. T.'s order, I have written to acknowledge the Gift, and to tell him something, if not all, of what I think of them. I do not tell him that I think his hand weakened; but I tell him (what is very true) that, though the main Myth of King Arthur's Dynasty in Britain has a certain Grandeur in my Eyes, the several legendary fragments of it never did much interest me; excepting the _Morte_, which I suppose most interested him also, as he took it up first of all. I am not sure if such a Romance as Arthur's is not best told in the artless old English in which it was told to Arthur's artless successors four hundred years ago; or dished up anew in something of a Ballad Style like his own Lady of Shalott, rather than elaborated into a modern Epic form. I never cared, however, for _any_ chivalric Epic; neither Tasso, nor Spenser, nor even Ariosto, whose Epic has a sort of Ballad-humour in it; Don Quixote is the only one of all this sort I have ever cared for.