My dear Taylor--This morning I received yours of the 2d, and with it a letter from Hessey enclosing a Bank post Bill of L30, an ample sum I assure you--more I had no thought of.--You should not have delayed so long in Fleet St.--leading an inactive life as you did was breathing poison: you will find the country air do more for you than you expect. But it must be proper country air. You must choose a spot. What sort of a place is Retford? You should have a dry, gravelly, barren, elevated country, open to the currents of air, and such a place is generally furnished with the finest springs--The neighbourhood of a rich enclosed fulsome manured arable land, especially in a valley and almost as bad on a flat, would be almost as bad as the smoke of Fleet St.--Such a place as this was Shanklin, only open to the south-east, and surrounded by hills in every other direction. From this south-east came the damps of the sea; which, having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke--I felt it very much. Since I have been here at Winchester I have been improving in health--it is not so confined--and there is on one side of the City a dry chalky down, where the air is worth Sixpence a pint. So if you do not get better at Retford, do not impute it to your own weakness before you have well considered the Nature of the air and soil--especially as Autumn is encroaching--for the Autumn fog over a rich land is like the steam from cabbage water. What makes the great difference between valesmen, flatlandmen and mountaineers? The cultivation of the earth in a great measure--Our health temperament and disposition are taken more (notwithstanding the contradiction of the history of Cain and Abel) from the air we breathe, than is generally imagined. See the difference between a Peasant and a Butcher.--I am convinced a great cause of it is the difference of the air they breathe: the one takes _his_ mingled with the fume of slaughter, the other from the dank exhalement from the glebe; the teeming damp that comes up from the plough-furrow is of great effect in taming the fierceness of a strong man--more than his labour--Let him be mowing furze upon a mountain, and at the day's end his thoughts will run upon a..axe[104] if he ever had handled one; let him leave the plough, and he will think quietly of his supper. Agriculture is the tamer of men--the steam from the earth is like drinking their Mother's milk--it enervates their nature--this appears a great cause of the imbecility of the Chinese: and if this sort of atmosphere is a mitigation to the energy of a strong man, how much more must it injure a weak one unoccupied unexercised--For what is the cause of so many men maintaining a good state in Cities, but occupation--An idle man, a man who is not sensitively alive to self-interest in a city cannot continue long in good health. This is