. . . . The danger of our situation is in the necessity of
keeping a good house and equipment at all times, and of living, when finances
are low, in one equable train, and with a household mounted to correspond with
far larger receipts. As for the occupation itself—ille ego quem nôsti—with all my inequalities, have managed to forge as few
disagreeables to myself as any, the most cautious. The uncertainty of a
sequence of éléves is our bitterest anxiety. If a man must live in the country with a London
soul, why he might even as
| 246 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. |
By the way, has Lord Byron
published since ‘Beppo’? Do desire the Murray, if you see him, to send me his next work on its first
coming out. Thank you for talking of ‘the ten,’ and of magazines
and other puerilities, but non eadem est ætas, non mens. I have said my say to my uttermost idea, and lo! it is as if it were
unsaid. I have so all-to-be-Greeked myself, that I am yet more stupid than of
old—an inconvenience somehow attached to the study of the finest language
in the world, and from which none, without exception, who know anything about
it, can possibly escape. . . . I was egregiously mistaken in believing that I
could lounge about London and Harrow, in the absence of my wife and family. The
truth is, persons whose existence are so monotonous, and arduous, and so
dreadfully precarious as ours, should not separate. I felt this last
year—I felt it again this—but, somehow, forgot to put it into the
form of a new observation. Here then, ‘what oft was thought’
is at length expressed for the benefit of the Universe. In a word, I will never
leave home MERIVALE’S ’RICHARDETTO.’ 247
