We paid a long visit at Longleat--very successful, inasmuch as Lady Bath was in the highest of good humour, and Tom Bath is dearer to my heart than ever. Lord Edward was at Longleat the latter part of our visit, and a great addition. He is totally unlike all the Thynnes I ever saw--full of fun and dashes out everything that comes into his head, astonishes them all, but governs the whole house. They all laugh the instant he opens his lips. CHAPTER VIII 1830-1831 _Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._ _Saturday, January 1830._ MY DEAREST THERESA, I _did_ write the day I had your first letter. To be sure you were not bound to know it, for I put my letter by so carefully, that at post time it was entirely missing. Then I was _took_ with a cold, and took to my bed, and by the time I was well enough to institute a successful search for my lost letter, it had grown so dull and dry by keeping that it was not worth sending. So you are snowed up at an inn. Odd! Your weather must be worse than ours, though that has been bad enough, but no great depths of snow. I think you sound comfortable. I have the oddest love of an Inn; I can’t tell why, except that I love all that belongs to travelling; and then one is so well treated. I have nothing to tell you, as I wrote a very disgustingly gossipy letter to Lady Harriet [Baring] which was to serve you too, and I have seen nobody since, except the Granthams. I suppose there are live people in the provinces; there are none in town--no carriages--no watchmen--no noise at all. We had four London University professors to dinner on Thursday (and Mr. Brougham was to have come, but was, of course, detained), proving that madmen were sane or some clever men mad--I forget which. However, our Professors were _very_ pretty company. I did not understand a word they said, but thought them very pleasant. Have you read Moore?[340] So beyond measure amusing! It is abused and praised with a violence that shows how much party feeling there is about it. The vanity both of the writer and the writee is very remarkable, but it does not prevent the book from being very amusing, and I think it altogether a very _fair_ piece of biography. Moore was not bound to make Lord Byron’s faults stand out; there are plenty of them and striking enough without amplification, and he mentions them with such excuses as he can find.