that you might have a little letter for your Sunday's
breakfast. Do not accuse me of growing enamoured of London; I would have
been in the country long ago if I could. . . . Nor do I think I shall
get away till the end of this month; and then I will go. I am not so bad
as Tennyson, who has been for six weeks intending to start every day for
Switzerland or Cornwall, he doesn't quite know which. However, his stay
has been so much gain to me; for he and John Allen are the two men that
give me pleasure here.

Tell Churchyard he must come up once again. . . . I saw a most lovely
Sir Joshua at Christie's a week ago; it went far far above my means.
There is an old hunting picture in Regent St. which I want him to look
at. I think it is Morland; whom I don't care twopence for; the horses
ill drawn; some good colour: the people English; good old England! I was
at a party of modern wits last night that made me creep into myself, and
wish myself away talking to any Suffolk old woman in her cottage, while
the trees murmured without. The wickedness of London appals me; and yet
I am no paragon.

_To F. Tennyson_.

BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE. _June_, 12/45.

DEAR FREDERIC,

Though I write from Boulge you are not to suppose I have been here ever
since I last wrote to you. On the contrary, I am but just returned from
London, where I spent a month, and saw all the sights and all the people
I cared to see. But what am I to tell you of them? Spedding, you know,
does not change: he is now the same that he was fourteen years old when I
first knew him at school more than twenty years ago; wise, calm, bald,
combining the best qualities of Youth and Age. And then as to things
seen; you know that one Exhibition tells another, and one Panorama
certifieth another, etc. If you want to know something of the Exhibition
however, read Fraser's Magazine for this month; there Thackeray has a
paper on the matter, full of fun. I met Stone in the street the other
day; he took me by the button, and told me in perfect sincerity, and with
increasing warmth, how, though he loved old Thackeray, yet these yearly
out-speakings of his sorely tried him; not on account of himself (Stone),
but on account of some of his friends, Charles Landseer, Maclise, etc.
Stone worked himself up to such a pitch under the pressure of forced
calmess that he at last said Thackeray would get himself horse-whipped
one day by one of these infuriated Apelleses. At this I, w