nor for your flat Country: but I really feel as one
who has bathed in Verdure. I suppose Town-living makes one alive to such
a Change.

I spent a long Day with Thompson: {40} and much liked the painted Roof.
On Thursday I went to Lynn: which I took a Fancy to: the odd old Houses:
the Quay: the really grand Inn (Duke's Head, in the Market place) and the
civil, Norfolk-talking, People. I went to Hunstanton, which is rather
dreary: one could see the Country at Sandringham was good. I enquired
fruitlessly about those Sandringham Pictures, etc.: even the Auctioneer,
whom I found in the Bar of the Inn, could tell nothing of where they had
gone.

_To W. B. Donne_.

MARKET HILL, WOODBRIDGE.
_Sat. July_ 18/63.

MY DEAR DONNE,

. . . I can hardly tell you whether I am much pleased with my new Boat;
for I hardly know myself. She is (as I doubted would be from the first)
rather awkward in our narrow River; but then she was to be a good Sea-
boat; and I don't know but she is; and will be better in all ways when we
have got her in proper trim. Yesterday we gave her what they call '_a
tuning_' in a rather heavy swell round Orford Ness: and she did well
without a reef, etc. But, now all is got, I don't any the more want to
go far away by Sea, any more than by Land; having no Curiosity left for
other Places, and glad to get back to my own Chair and Bed after three or
four Days' Absence. So long as I get on the Sea from time to time, it is
much the same to me whether off Aldbro' or Penzance. And I find I can't
sleep so well on board as I used to do thirty years ago: and not to get
one's Sleep, you know, indisposes one more or less for the Day. However,
we talk of Dover, Folkestone, Holland, etc., which will give one's
sleeping Talents a _tuning_.

_To George Crabbe_.

WOODBRIDGE, _July_ 19, [1863].

MY DEAR GEORGE,

You tell me the Romney is at Gardner's: but where is Gardner's? And what
was the Price of the Portrait? Laurence said well about Romney that, as
compared to Sir Joshua and Gainsboro', his Pictures looked tinted, rather
than painted; the colour of the Cheek (for instance) rather superficially
laid on, as rouge, rather than ingrained, and mantling like Blood from
below. Laurence had seen those at last year's Exhibition: I have not
seen near so many. I remember one that seemed to me capital at Lord
Bute's in Bedfordshire.

I came home yesterday from a short Cruise to Yarmouth, etc., where some
people