Woodbridge: Nov. 13/79.

My dear Lady,

Now that your anxieties are, as I hope, over, and that you are returned, as I suppose, to London, I send you a budget. First: the famous Belvidere Hat; which I think you ought to stick into your Records. [163a] Were I a dozen years younger, I should illustrate all the Book in such a way; but, as my French song says, ‘Le Temps est trop court pour de si longs projets.’

Next, you behold a Photo of Carlyle’s Niece, which he bid her send me two or three years ago in one of her half-yearly replies to my Enquiries. What a shrewd, tidy, little Scotch Body! Then you have her last letter, telling of her Uncle, and her married Self, and thanking me for a little Wedding gift which I told her was bought from an Ipswich Pawnbroker [163b]—a very good, clever fellow, who reads Carlyle, and comes over here now and then for a talk with me. Mind, when you return me the Photo, that you secure it around with your Letter paper, that the Postman may not stamp into it. Perhaps this trouble is scarce worth giving you.

‘Clerke Sanders’ has been familiar to me these fifty years almost; since Tennyson used to repeat it, and ‘Helen of Kirkconnel,’ at some Cambridge gathering. At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of his Beams in Keats’ Poem: with a Pipe in his mouth. Afterwards he got a touch, I used to say, of Haydon’s Lazarus. Talking of Keats, do not forget to read Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of him: in which you will find what you may not have guessed from his Poetry (though almost unfathomably deep in that also) the strong, masculine, Sense and Humour, etc., of the man more akin to Shakespeare, I am tempted to think, in a perfect circle of Poetic Faculties, than any Poet since.

Well: the Leaves which hung on more bravely than ever I remember are at last whirling away in a Cromwell Hurricane—(not quite that, neither)—and my old Man says he thinks Winter has set in at last. We cannot complain hitherto. Many summer flowers held out in my Garden till a week ago, when we dug up the Beds in order for next year. So now little but the orange Marigold, which I love for its colour (Irish and Spanish) and Courage, in living all Winter through. Within doors, I am again at my everlasting Crabbe! doctoring his Posthumous Tales À la mode of those of ‘The Hall,’ to finish a Volume of simple ‘Selections’ from his other works: all which I will leave to be used, or not, whenever old Crabbe rises up again: which will not be in the Lifetime of yours ever

E. F.G.

I dared not decypher all that Mrs. Wister wrote in my behalf—because I knew it must be sincere! Would she care for my Eternal Crabbe?