onth or a week to our
barren coast, which is all the travel I have to tell of, you can imagine
all that as easily as my stay at home, with the old Pictures about me,
and often the old Books to read. I went indeed to London last February
for the sole purpose of seeing our Donne: and glad am I to have done so
as I heard it gave him a little pleasure. That is a closed Book now. His
Death {337} was not unexpected, and even not to be deprecated, as you
know; but I certainly never remember a year of such havock among my
friends as this: if not by Death itself, by Death's preliminary work and
warning. . . . I wonder to find myself no worse dealt with than by
Bronchitis, bad enough, which came upon me last Christmas, hung upon me
all Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and though comparatively dormant for the
last three wet weeks (perhaps from repeated doses of Sea Air) gives
occasional Signs that it is not dead, but, on the contrary, will revive
with Winter. Let me hear at least how you have been, and how are; I
shall not grudge your being all well.

Aldis Wright has sent me a very fine Photo of Spedding done from one of
Mrs. Cameron's of which a copy is at Trinity Lodge. It is so fine that I
scarce know if it gives me more pleasure or pain to look at it. Insomuch
that I keep it in a drawer, not yet able to make up my mind to have it
framed and so hung up before me.

My good old Housekeeper has been (along with so many more) very ill,
bedded for five or six weeks; only now able to get about again. I have
this morning been scolding her for sending away a woman who came to do
her work, without consulting me beforehand: she makes out that the woman
wanted to go: I find the woman is very ready to return. 'These are my
troubles, Mr. Wesley,' as a Gentleman said to him when the Footman had
put too much coal on the fire.

_To W. F. Pollock_.

WOODBRIDGE. [1882.]

MY DEAR POLLOCK,

. . . The Book which has really, and deeply, interested me, and quite
against Expectation, is Froude's Carlyle Biography; which has (quite
contrary to expectation also) not only made me honour Carlyle more, but
even love him, which I had never taken into account before. In the
Biography, Froude seems to me to treat his man with Candour and Justice:
even a little too severe in attributing to systematic Selfishness what
seems to me rather unreflecting neglect, Carlyle's relations to his Wife,
whom, so far as we read, he loved. Of his Love for his o