I meant to have gone to Kitlands to-day, but the coach was full. Recollect that _you_ are not a man of many cares new taken up, and therefore may find time to shower your wiser meditations upon a sheet of paper, which addressed to me under cover to "R. W. Hay, Esq., Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, Downing Street," will not be lost upon one who sometimes did but observe and wonder, but has now to enquire and dispatch. Thompson had been with a reading party at Keswick during the summer, but had proved a bad correspondent. "I have heard," Spedding writes in November, "occasionally from Mirehouse dim intimations of your supposed existence; and latterly I have seen Martineau, to whom I have carefully pointed out the weak points in your character, which he had not observed. I have reason to believe that I am rising rapidly in public estimation, and I have only to pray that I may not become too sufficient for my place. My sense of Duty has already been appealed to in the most flattering manner, to draw me to the undertaking of nobler business, which, being capable of, I have no right (it is said) to decline. My capacity, it would seem, is beyond doubt; and, as it has been evinced without any effort or observation of mine, perhaps the best way after all will be to let it have its own way and trouble my soul no more about it. Turn it adrift in the world, leave it to find its own market and provide its own goods, and if my soul (which would be a stranger in such pilgrimage) should return in after years to enquire after it, who knows how great she may find it grown? P. v. A. is away for his holidays. If you can suggest a good subject for a dramatic romance out of English or Scotch history between the Conquest and the time of Elizabeth, you shall thereby do him a good turn, and perhaps get praised in a note. Helps has just been here asking for information about Cambridge in general, more particularly about you and Blakesley. I could only tell him what I knew of you, which you must confess is not much to your credit. Sterling has established himself and his family in Bayswater, and gives tea parties to the wiser minds. I am going thither to-night. Garden (I understand from himself, writing from Carstairs) is to curatise in Cornwall. D. D. H. thinks there is humour in an equity draft.... My own career is as far from being marked out as ever. There is no present prospect of a vacancy here, and I cannot get any body to advise me to accept it if there were." In the following year Thompson was appointed to the Head Mastership of the recently founded Leicester and Leicestershire Collegiate School, and at the opening ceremony on August 9, 1836, he delivered an address, of which Spedding says: