You and I shall I
suppose quarrel as often as we meet: but I can quarrel and never be the
worse with you. How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You
would stay--I wouldn't--then I would--then we did. Do you remember the
face of that girl at the Bazaar, who kept talking to us and looking all
round the room for fresh customers--a way women have--that is, a way of
doing rather gracefully? Then the gentleman who sang Ivy green; a very
extraordinary accentuation, it seemed to me: but I believe you admired it
very much. Really, if these little excursions in the company of one's
friends leave such a pleasant taste behind in the memory, one should
court them oftener. And yet then perhaps the relish would grow less: it
is the infrequency that gives them room to expand. I shall never get to
Italy, that seems clear. My great travel this year will be to Carlisle.
Quid prosit ista tua longa peregrinatio, etc. Travelling, you know, is a
vanity. The _soul_ remains the same. An amorem possis fugare, an
libidinis exsiccari, an timorem mortis depellere? What then will you say
to Pollock's being married! I hear he is to be. Ad matrimonium fugis?
Miser! Scaevola noster dicere solebat, etc. Excuse my overflowing with
philosophy. I am going this evening to eat toasted cheese with that
celebrated poet Bernard Barton. And I must soon stir, and look about for
my great coat, brush myself, etc. It blows a harrico, as Theodore Hook
used to say, and will rain before I get to Woodbridge. Those poor
mistaken lilac buds there out of the window! and an old Robin, ruffled up
to his thickest, sitting mournfully under them, quite disheartened. For
you must know the mild winter is just giving way to a remarkably severe
spring. . . . I wish you were here to smoke a pipe with me. I play of
evenings some of Handel's great choruses which are the bravest music
after all. I am getting to the true John Bull style of music. I delight
in Handel's Allegro and Penseroso. Do you know the fine pompous joyous
chorus of 'These pleasures, Mirth, if thou canst give, etc.'? Handel
certainly does in music what old Bacon desires in his Essay on Masques,
'Let the songs be loud and cheerful, not puling, etc.' One might think
the Water music was written from this text.

* * * * *

About this time FitzGerald was engaged in collecting information for
Carlyle on the subject of Cromwell's Lincolnshire campaign, and it is to
this he refers in the