ot. The _Shape_ I have wrought the
Play into is good, I think: the Dialogue good also: but the Choruses
(though well contrived for the progress of the Story) are very false to
AEschylus; and anyhow want the hand of a Poet. Mine, as I said, are only
a sort of 'Entr' acte' Music, which would be better supplied by Music
itself.

I will send you in a day or two my Christmas Gossip for the East Anglian,
where I am more at home. But you have heard me tell it all before.

It is too late to wish you a good Christmas--(I wonder how you passed it,
mine was solitary and dull enough) but you know I wish you all the Good
the New Year can bring. Love to Elizabeth; do not be so long without
writing again, if only half a dozen lines, to yours and hers sincerely,

E. F. G.

_To S. Laurence_.

MARKET HILL: WOODBRIDGE.
_Jan._ 13/70.

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

Can you tell me (in a line) how I should treat some old Pictures of mine
which have somehow got rusty with the mixt damp and then fires (I
suppose) of my new house, which, after being built at near double its
proper cost, is just what I do not want, according to the usage of the
Ballyblunder Family, of which I am a very legitimate offshoot?

If you were down here, I think I should make you take a life-size Oil
Sketch of the Head and Shoulders of my Captain of the Lugger. You see by
the enclosed that these are neither of them of a bad sort: and the Man's
Soul is every way as well proportioned, missing in nothing that may
become A Man, as I believe. He and I will, I doubt, part Company; well
as he likes me, which is perhaps as well as a sailor cares for any one
but Wife and Children: he likes to be, what he is born to be, his own
sole Master, of himself, and of other men. So now I have got him a fair
start, I think he will carry on the Lugger alone: I shall miss my Hobby,
which is no doubt the last I shall ride in this world: but I shall also
get eased of some Anxiety about the lives of a Crew for which I now feel
responsible. And this last has been a Year of great Anxiety in this
respect.

I had to run to London for one day about my Eyes (which, you see by my
MS., are not in prime order at all) and saw a Sir Joshua at a Framer's
window, and brought it down. The face faded, but elegant and lady-like
always; the dress in colour quite Venetian. It was in Leicester Square;
I can't think how all the world of Virtuosos kept passing and would not
give twenty pounds for it. Bu