the ravages of time had
rendered dangerous; the horse at Charing Cross is gone, no one knows
whither,--and all this has taken place while you have been settling
whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelled with a-- or a--. For aught I
see, you had almost as well remain where you are, and not come, like a
Struldbrug, into a world where few were born when you went away. Scarce
here and there one will be able to make out your face; all your opinions
will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with
fastidiousness as wit of the last age. Your way of mathematics has
already given way to a new method which, after all, is, I believe, the
old doctrine of Maclaurin new-vamped up with what he borrowed of the
negative quantity of fluxions from Euler.

Poor Godwin! I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate
churchyard. There are some verses upon it, written by Miss--, which if
I thought good enough I would send you. He was one of those who would
have hailed your return, not with boisterous shouts and clamors, but
with the complacent gratulations of a philosopher anxious to promote
knowledge, as leading to happiness; but his systems and his theories are
ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould. Coleridge is just dead, having lived
just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to
nature but a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he died
he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic poem on the "Wandering of
Cain," in twenty-four books. It is said he has left behind him more than
forty thousand treatises in criticism, metaphysics, and divinity: but
few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to
wrap up spices. You see what mutation the busy hand of Time has
produced, while you have consumed in foolish, voluntary exile that time
which might have gladdened your friends, benefited your country--But
reproaches are useless. Gather up the wretched relics, my friend, as
fast as you can, and come to your old home. I will rub my eyes and try
to recognize you. We will shake withered hands together, and talk of old
things,--of St. Mary's church and the barber's opposite, where the young
students in mathematics used to assemble. Poor Crisp, that kept it
afterwards, set up a fruiterer's shop in Trumpington Street, and for
aught I know resides there still; for I saw the name up in the last
journey I took there with my sister just before she died. I suppose you
heard that I had