With reference to his other occupations of the hour,--_Lamia_ he had finished, and for the present he did no more to _King Stephen_. Realizing the low repute into which critical derision had brought him as a member of the Cockney School, he proposed to withhold his next volume of poems in hope that the production of _Otho the Great_ at Drury Lane in the autumn might, if successful, create a more favourable atmosphere for its reception; and was in consequence seriously dashed when he learnt that Kean was on the point of starting for America. One of his chief present pursuits was studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto. The wholesome brightness of an unusually fine season continuing to sustain and soothe him, he wrote the last, most unclouded and serenely accomplished of his meditative odes, that _To Autumn_. A sudden return of the epistolary mood came upon him, and between September 17th and 27th he poured himself out to his brother and sister-in-law in a new long journal-letter, full of confidences on every subject that dwelt in or flitted through his mind except the one master-subject of the passion he was striving to keep subdued by absence. 'I am inclined,' he says, 'to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and enchaining as a good long letter, be it composed of what it may.' Accordingly he ranges as usual over all manner of miscellaneous themes, discussing his own and his brother's situation and future; telling of Haydon and his inconsiderate behaviour about the loan, and of Dilke's political dogmatism and over-anxiety about his boy; giving accounts of the several members of the Hampstead circle, mixed up with playful messages to his sister-in-law, whom he represents as caring nothing for these tiresome people and interrupting her husband's reading of the letter to insist on prattling about her baby. He adds anecdotes of his visit to her family in London, and a propos of babies tells of a thing he had heard Charles Lamb say. 'A child in arms was passing by his chair toward its mother, in the nurse's arms. Lamb took hold of the long clothes, saying: "Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?"' With an unexpressed shaft of inward mockery at his own plight, he describes the ridiculous figure cut by a man in love, the victim in this case being his friend Haslam; relates jokes practical and other which had lately passed between Brown, Dilke, and himself, and after a very sensible excursion into history and current politics, to which he was never at all so indifferent as is commonly said, he dwells with a kindly, humorous enjoyment on the sedate maiden-ladylike ways and aspects of the cathedral town where he found the autumn quietude so comforting. This sets him thinking of his fragment of a poem written seven months earlier and breathing a similar spirit, the _Eve of St Mark_; so he transcribes it for their benefit, and also, in odd contrast, a long passage from Burton's _Anatomy_ which had tickled some