vulgarity, insipidity, cant, and monstrous unnaturalness, has the effect of provoking my understanding and imagination into agreeable exercise." The time had come when, after six years of service, Spedding resolved to shake himself free from the uncongenial business of the Colonial Office, and devote himself to what was to be the work of his life. On the 19th of August 1841 he writes from Wycliffe Rectory to Thompson who was then in Germany: You told me to write on speculation and not put off too long, but I suppose I am not the less qualified to perform the former part of your injunction for having neglected to perform the latter. But I suppose the worst consequence will be that my letter will not reach you, by which you will save something in postage and lose nothing in any other way. The fact is that your letter reached me during the last hours of my official life, when between the duty of clearing my table, and preparing for another and a better life (packing up, to wit), I had no time to write anything that was to go as far as Dresden. From the business of Downing St. I relapsed suddenly to the not less absorbing recreations of the 12th August and the moors; and since we left the grouse in quiet I have been on constant duty in looking at rocks and rivers and whatever there is to be looked at in a country not barren of natural attractions and the scene of one of Walter Scott's poems. To-day I have been I do not know how many miles to see a handsome modern house and fine estate on the banks of the Tees, and to enjoy the most formidable of all mortal entertainments, a lunch of about 16 persons at a house you were never in before; all low voices and only one of the family known to you by name. However the beef was good, and silence is richer than speech. I am now returned, my skin is full of tea and bread and butter, and the room is full of young women talking about ghosts and singing Irish melodies. I have borrowed this sheet of thin paper that you may have the less to pay, and I have set off in this minute hand that I may have the more room to utter whatsoever shall be given to me to utter in this house: what that may be I shall not stay to conjecture, but proceed at once to the proof.