My dear Hodgson,—Your letter, having been directed to me paste restante, did not reach me till the 16th day after its arrival at Ostend. As for Moore’s letter, Heaven only knows how long it has been slumbering. We have no dead letters here. . . .
Sir James Wedderburn (Webster), whom you
must have met at Newstead, has passed a few days here, on his road to Paris.
Did you ever see Lady Frances? She is
the only person I ever beheld in whom was everything that the eye looks for in
woman. She, and she alone of all whom I have ever seen, had the
‘vultus nimium lubricus
aspici,’ ‘that beauty over which the eye
glides with giddy delight, incapable of fixing upon any particular
charm.’ Goldsmith
makes no acknowledgment to Horace, though he
is indebted to him to the above amount. Sir James has
survived Waterloo, but he
has not survived his love of writing. He makes ‘born’ rhyme to
‘storm,’ and ‘suspect’ rhyme to ‘respect.’
About the latter, in vain do I assert that in English LETTER FROM SCROPE DAVIES. 181
Your letter has recalled to my mind scenes the recollection of which now constitutes my only delight. Bacon somewhere in his letters observes, ‘Aristotle saith young men may be happy by hope, so why should not old men and sequestered men by remembrance?’ The past and the future are the sole object of man’s contemplation. There is no present, or if there is, it is a point on which we cannot stand. While I am now writing the future becomes the past. Happiness then is a pursuit, not an attainment. In one of those runs with the Duke of Rutland’s hounds, when the fox is killed the sport is over, or to be enjoyed again only in recollection after dinner.
| 182 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. |
Will the present ministry stand? Sir R. Wilson says they cannot settle into permanent power. So Eldon is extinct. I cannot bear to hear his adulators talking about his giving a decision without turning to the right or to the left, whereas he looked to the right and to the leftl without giving a decision. But what have I to do with politics? W. Drury 2 is doing well at Brussels. He has upwards of seventy pupils. In the summer of last year, I encountered Polehampton at Antwerp, and with him Lewis, the fishing and shooting conduct of Eton. It was amusing to observe how they viewed everything through a bad pair of English spectacles.
Adieu! and when you have nothing else to do, write to one who is out of the world.
I have just escaped a duel for having written a couplet on an amateur actor.
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Not to be hiss’d delights the dunce,
But who can groan and hiss at once?
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