e letters a year each. Shall both of
us, or either, live three years more, beginning with the year that opens
to-morrow? I somehow believe _not_: which I say not as a doleful thing
(indeed you may look at it as a very ludicrous one). Well, we shall see.
I am all for the short and merry life. Last night I began the sixth Book
of Lucretius in bed. You laugh grimly again? I have not looked into it
for more than a year, and I took it up by mistake for one of Swift's
dirty volumes; and, having got into bed with it, did not care to get out
to change it.

The delightful lady . . . is going to leave this neighbourhood and carry
her young Husband {261} to Oxford, there to get him some Oriental
Professorship one day. He is a delightful fellow, and, _I_ say, will, if
he live, be the best Scholar in England. Not that I think Oxford will be
so helpful to his studies as his counting house at Ipswich was. However,
being married he cannot at all events become Fellow, and, as so many do,
dissolve all the promise of Scholarship in Sloth, Gluttony, and sham
Dignity. I shall miss them both more than I can say, and must take to
Lucretius! to comfort me. I have entirely given up the _Genteel_ Society
here about; and scarce ever go anywhere but to the neighbouring Parson,
{262a} with whom I discuss Paley's Theology, and the Gorham Question. I
am going to him to-night, by the help of a Lantern, in order to light out
the Old Year with a Cigar. For he is a great Smoker, and a very fine
fellow in all ways.

I have not seen any one you know since I last wrote; nor heard from any
one: except dear old Spedding, who really came down and spent two days
with us, me and that Scholar and his Wife in their Village, {262b} in
their delightful little house, in their pleasant fields by the River
side. Old Spedding was delicious there; always leaving a mark, I say, in
all places one has been at with him, a sort of Platonic perfume. For has
he not all the beauty of the Platonic Socrates, with some personal Beauty
to boot? He explained to us one day about the laws of reflection in
water: and I said then one never could look at the willow whose branches
furnished the text without thinking of him. How beastly this reads! As
if he gave us a lecture! But you know the man, how quietly it all came
out; only because I petulantly denied his plain assertion. For I really
often cross him only to draw him out; and vain as I may be, he is one of
those