one reason, it has really caused me some confusion and trouble
with other more or less Irish bodies, being as common in Ireland as
'Smith,' etc., here--and particularly with 'Edward'--I suppose because of
the patriot Lord who bore [it]. I should not, even if I made bold to
wish so to do, propose to treat you in the same fashion; inasmuch as I
like your Kemble name, which has become as it were classical in England.

LXV.

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 ou