“If your letter had contained a pleasanter account of your own convalescence, it would have been one of the most agreeable that I ever received. There is zeal enough in the world and good will enough to do all the work which is wanted if they can but be rightly directed. It is neither a natural nor a fit state of things that there should be more zeal and activity on the wrong side than the right.
“I believe, as you do, that great and permanent good may be effected by colonisation, by cultivating waste lands, and by co-operative societies. There will be difficulties in these latter, when the question arises where the limits of private property are to be fixed. In every Utopian romance which has fallen in my way a despotism of laws, as strict as any military discipline, is always part of the scheme.
“Such a man as is wanted in Parliament I think we
shall find in Sadler, whom I am to meet
in the course of next month at Lowther. I have to talk about Church Methodism
with him; the first time I ever heard his name was in connection with that
subject, as being the person on whose countenance and support the prime mover
(Mark Robinson of
| 58 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 55. |
“As for the political economists, no words can express the thorough contempt which I feel for them. They discard all moral considerations from their philosophy, and in their practice they have no compassion for flesh and blood.
“I am writing a life of Ignatius Loyola for the Christmas number of the Foreign Review. The last number has not reached me, and of its contributors I only know that an Edinburgh person, by name Carlisle, has written the most striking ones upon German literature, and that the paper upon Klopstock is by a young man whom I introduced to it, whose name is Heraud,—a man of extraordinary powers, and not less extraordinary industry and ardour; he seems capable of learning any thing, except how to check his own exuberance in verse.
“God bless you, my dear Gooch! With hands fuller than I could wish them, and with a head fuller than my hands, and perhaps a heart fuller than my head, I must leave books and papers to go pic-nic-ing upon the hills, where I wish you could be with us.
