the weather was fine. The place is very desert,
but a battle was probably fought here 200 years ago, as an Obelisk
planted by my Papa on the wrong site intimates. Poor Carlyle got into
sad error from that deluding Obelisk: which Liston used to call (in this
case with truth) an Obstacle. I am afraid Carlyle will make a mad mess
of Cromwell and his Times: what a poor figure Fairfax will cut! I am
very tired of these heroics; and I can worship no man who has but a
square inch of brains more than myself. I think there is but one Hero:
and that is the Maker of Heroes.

Here I am reading Virgil's delightful Georgics for the first time. They
really attune perfectly well with the plains and climate of Naseby. Valpy
(whose edition I have) cannot quite follow Virgil's plough--in its
construction at least. But the main acts of agriculture seem to have
changed very little, and the alternation of green and corn crops is a
good dodge. And while I heard the fellows going out with their horses to
plough as I sat at breakfast this morning, I also read--

Libra die somnique pares ubi fecerit horas,
Et medium luci atque umbris jam dividit orbem,
Exercete, viri, tauros, serite hordea campis
Usque sub extremum brumae intractabilis imbrem. {134}

One loves Virgil somehow.

_To Bernard Barton_.

[NASEBY], _Septr_. 22/42.

MY DEAR BARTON,

The pictures are left all ready packed up in Portland Place, and shall
come down with me, whenever that desirable event takes place. In the
mean while here I am as before: but having received a long and
interesting letter from Carlyle asking information about this Battle
field, I have trotted about rather more to ascertain names of places,
positions, etc. After all he will make a mad book. I have just seen
some of the bones of a dragoon and his horse who were found foundered in
a morass in the field--poor dragoon, much dismembered by time: his less
worthy members having been left in the owner's summer-house for the last
twenty years have disappeared one by one: but his skull is kept safe in
the hall: not a bad skull neither: and in it some teeth yet holding, and
_a bit of the iron heel of his boot_, put into the skull by way of
convenience. This is what Sir Thomas Browne calls 'making a man act his
Antipodes.' {135} I have got a fellow to dig at one of the great general
graves in the field: and he tells me to-night that he has come to bones:
to-morrow I will select a neat