ion into
the bargain. You know, from long habit, what a good action is worth
better than I do. I dare say you will be more pleased to learn than I
am to record the fact that I have been again decoyed into the society of
ladies and gentlemen, and have accepted an invitation to pass a few days
at Neesdale Park with Mr. Travers,--christened Leopold, who calls you
"his old friend,"--a term which I take for granted belongs to that class
of poetic exaggeration in which the "dears" and "darlings" of conjugal
intercourse may be categorized. Having for that visit no suitable
garments in my knapsack, kindly tell Jenkes to forward me a portmanteau
full of those which I habitually wore as Kenelm Chillingly, directed
to me at "Neesdale Park, near Beaverston." Let me find it there on
Wednesday.

I leave this place to-morrow morning in company with a friend of the
name of Bowles: no relation to the reverend gentleman of that name who
held the doctrine that a poet should bore us to death with fiddle-faddle
minutia of natural objects in preference to that study of the
insignificant creature Man, in his relations to his species, to which
Mr. Pope limited the range of his inferior muse; and who, practising as
he preached, wrote some very nice verses, to which the Lake school and
its successors are largely indebted. My Mr. Bowles has exercised his
faculty upon Man, and has a powerful inborn gift in that line which
only requires cultivation to render him a match for any one. His more
masculine nature is at present much obscured by that passing cloud
which, in conventional language, is called "a hopeless attachment." But
I trust, in the course of our excursion, which is to be taken on foot,
that this vapour may consolidate by motion, as some old-fashioned
astronomers held that the nebula does consolidate into a matter-of-fact
world. Is it Rochefoucauld who says that a man is never more likely to
form a hopeful attachment for one than when his heart is softened by a
hopeless attachment to another? May it be long, my dear father, before
you condole with me on the first or congratulate me on the second.

Your affectionate son,

KENELM.

Direct to me at Mr. Travers's. Kindest love to my mother.

The answer to this letter is here subjoined as the most convenient place
for its insertion, though of course it was not received till some days
after the date of my next chapter.

SIR PETER CHILLINGLY, BART., TO KENELM CHILLINGLY, ESQ.