I certainly wish that Alfred had devoted his diminished powers to translating Sophocles, or AEschylus, as I fancy a Poet should do--_one_ work, at any rate--of his great Predecessors. But Pegasus won't be harnessed. From which I descend to my own humble feet. I will send you some copies of Calderon when I have uncloseted and corrected them. As to Agamemnon, I bound up a Copy of him in the other Translations I sent to Trinity Library--not very wisely, I doubt; but I thought the Book would just be put up on its shelf, and I had given all I was asked for, or ever could be asked for. The Master, however, wrote me that it came to his Eyes, and I dare say he thought I had best have let AEschylus alone. My Version was not intended for those who know the Original; but, by hook or by crook, to interest some who do not. The _Shape_ I have wrought the Play into is good, I think: the Dialogue good also: but the Choruses (though well contrived for the progress of the Story) are very false to AEschylus; and anyhow want the hand of a Poet. Mine, as I said, are only a sort of 'Entr' acte' Music, which would be better supplied by Music itself. I will send you in a day or two my Christmas Gossip for the East Anglian, where I am more at home. But you have heard me tell it all before. It is too late to wish you a good Christmas--(I wonder how you passed it, mine was solitary and dull enough) but you know I wish you all the Good the New Year can bring. Love to Elizabeth; do not be so long without writing again, if only half a dozen lines, to yours and hers sincerely, E. F. G. _To S. Laurence_. MARKET HILL: WOODBRIDGE. _Jan._ 13/70. MY DEAR LAURENCE, Can you tell me (in a line) how I should treat some old Pictures of mine which have somehow got rusty with the mixt damp and then fires (I suppose) of my new house, which, after being built at near double its proper cost, is just what I do not want, according to the usage of the Ballyblunder Family, of which I am a very legitimate offshoot? If you were down here, I think I should make you take a life-size Oil Sketch of the Head and Shoulders of my Captain of the Lugger. You see by the enclosed that these are neither of them of a bad sort: and the Man's Soul is every way as well proportioned, missing in nothing that may become A Man, as I believe. He and I will, I doubt, part Company; well as he likes me, which is perhaps as well as a sailor cares for any one but Wife and Children: he likes to be, what he is born to be, his own sole Master, of himself, and of other men. So now I have got him a fair start, I think he will carry on the Lugger alone: I shall miss my Hobby, which is no doubt the last I shall ride in this world: but I shall also get eased of some Anxiety about the lives of a Crew for which I now feel responsible. And this last has been a Year of great Anxiety in this respect.