I have not seen any one you know since I last wrote; nor heard from any one: except dear old Spedding, who really came down and spent two days with us, me and that Scholar and his Wife in their Village, in their delightful little house, in their pleasant fields by the River side. Old Spedding was delicious there; always leaving a mark, I say, in all places one has been at with him, a sort of Platonic perfume. For has he not all the beauty of the Platonic Socrates, with some personal beauty to boot? He explained to us one day about the laws of reflection in water; and I said then one never could look at the willow whose branches furnished the text without thinking of him. How beastly this reads! As if he gave us a lecture! But you know the man, how quietly it all came out; only because I petulantly denied his plain assertion. For I really often cross him only to draw him out; and vain as I may be, he is one of those that I am well content to make shine at my own expense. In August 1851 he writes again to Frederick Tennyson: Almost the only man I hear from is dear old Spedding, who has lost his Father, and is now, I suppose, a rich man. This makes no apparent change in his way of life; he has only hired an additional Attic in Lincoln's Inn Fields, so as to be able to bed a friend upon occasion. I may have to fill it ere long. And a few months later: Spedding is immutably wise, good, and delightful; not as immutably well in Body, I think, though he does not complain. The great work went slowly on, but nothing as yet was published. Spedding had just taken over Ellis's portion and was devoting himself to this. We get a glimpse of him again in FitzGerald's letters: I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved, and whose death-bed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon. It was 1857 before the first three volumes appeared, followed by three others in 1858, and by the final volume in 1859. Ellis did not live to see the completion of the work, for he died in May of that year. FitzGerald, writing in 1857 to Cowell, who was now in Calcutta, from Portland Terrace, where he lived during his early married life, says: Spedding has been once here in near three months. His _Bacon_ keeps coming out: his part, the Letters, etc., of Bacon, is not come yet; so it remains to be seen what he will do then, but I can't help thinking he has let the Pot boil too long. It was 1861, however, before the first volume of the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and Spedding found that he had already been forestalled by Hepworth Dixon in _The Story of Lord Bacon's Life_. In a note to the earliest letter printed, probably the earliest specimen remaining of Bacon's handwriting, he says, with quiet contempt: