unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I never think it fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred's second volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age, though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius; and was going to say something about the _Quarterly_ in a Review of _The Doctor_, which he was, or is, writing for Blackwood. I also sent him yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most gentlemanly letters. Spedding was now nearly six-and-twenty, and had no settled plan of life before him. "For myself," he says, "I am unsettled in all my prospects and plans. I am, in fact, doing nothing, but I flatter myself I am pausing on the brink to take a good look at the different ways of life which are open to me before I take the fatal plunge." At the end of 1834 he invited Thompson, who was then at York, to visit him at Mirehouse. Excuses shall not be admitted, at least not such as yours. Is there not a stage-coach which fears God, and do you _for that reason_ refuse to employ it? You ought rather to encourage it. What is a little bile or rheumatism, compared with the advancement of Truth, and the conservation of the Faith that is on the earth? Moreover, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a coach leaves Kendal at 8 o'clock in the morning, and arrives in Keswick about one, having traversed in the short space of five hours many miles of the finest scenery in the country, containing both other things and five lakes, and the dwelling-places of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Hamilton[104] (more commonly known as Cyril Thornton). As for your time lost last term, that I know, from my experience of your character, to be a fiction of modesty: and as for your hopes of making up for it at home, that I know, from my experience of my own character, to be humbug. Besides, you write as one balancing his own desires according to a principle of enlightened self-interest. You forget that it is not for your own pleasure, but for my profit, that I ask you to come. Am I not sliding daily from bad to worse? Am I not losing the race I do not run? Am I not learning to look on all knowledge as vanity, all labour as sorrow? for not the knowledge for which men labour is profitable, but the labour only, and yet who can labour for that which profiteth not? Have I not already parted with the hope, and am I not now parting with the wish, to advance? Am I performing any duty? Am I making any money? Am I not falling away from the Apostolic mind, notwithstanding? Am I not taking pleasure in the shooting of snipes? Am I not in danger of having a bad German pronunciation for evermore? Roll these things in your mind, and then roll yourself into the coach. I will meet you