heat here!

I have just been naming all Mr. Browne's pictures for him. This he has
insisted on for three years, and at last this very hot day after an early
dinner pens and paper were brought out and I have been writing down awful
calumnies about Cuyp, Both, etc. Who could have painted Catharine of
Medicis, do you know? We are afraid to call it Vandyke, as he lived (I
believe) a century after her: and Mr. B. won't give up its being
Catharine's portrait. So here we are in a fix. I went to see Lord
Northampton's place Castle Ashby a week ago: expected pictures, and saw
very bad ones. The house is very handsome, built by Inigo Jones.

I weigh 14 stone--fact.

_To John Allen_.

[KEYSOE, _August_ 1842.]

MY DEAR JOHN ALLEN,

. . . I am much _entete_ at present about one Matthews, {122} a preacher
at Bedford, who would do very well for Manchester in opposition to
Chartists, etc. If you are here on a Friday or a Sunday go and hear him.
I would gladly subscribe to remove him from Bedford. All this you will
think absurd; and so perhaps it is.

I have been reading Stobaeus' Anthology as I saunter in the fields: a
pretty collection of Greek aphorisms in verse and prose. The bits of
Menander and the comic poets are very acceptable. And this is really all
I have looked at all this summer.

BEDFORD, _August_ 29/42.

MY DEAREST FELLOW,

Your letter reached me this morning and gave me much pleasure. An old
acquaintance is not the worse for its wear, I think. This very time ten
years ago we were in Wales together: I at Mr. Rees' boarding-house at
Tenby: and there I made chance acquaintance with the whiskered man {123}
at whose house I am now staying:--then a boy of sixteen. He is now a man
of business, of town-politics, and more intent on the first of September
than on anything else in the world. I see very little of him. . . .

I occasionally read sentences about the Virtues out of this collection of
Stobaeus, and look into Sartor Resartus, which has fine things in it: and
a little Dante and a little Shakespeare. But the great secret of all is
the not eating meat. To that the world must come, I am sure. Only it
makes one grasshopper foolish. I also receive letters from Morton and F.
Tennyson full of fine accounts of Italy, finer than any I ever read. They
came all of a sudden on Cicero's villa--one of them at least, the
Formian--with a mosaic pavement leading thro' lemon gardens down to the
sea, and a l