I own my delay, but I have been absent from Ramsbury some days, and immersed in the miserable provincial politics of my brother moon-rakers of this county. I have to thank you for your former communication, and for this of to-day. To be sure it is impossible that Lord B. should seriously contemplate, or, if he does, he must not expect us to encourage, this mad scheme. I do not know what in the world to say, but presume some one has been talking nonsense to him. Let Jim Perry go to Venezuela if he will—he may edit his ‘Independent Gazette’ amongst the Independents themselves, and reproduce his stale puns and politics without let or hindrance. But our poet is too good for a planter—too good to sit down before a fire made of mare’s legs, to a dinner of beef without salt and bread. It is the wildest of all his meditations—pray tell him. The plague and Yellow Jack, and famine and free quarter, besides a thousand other ills, will stare him in the face. No tooth-brushes, no corn-rubbers, no Quarterly Reviews. In short, plenty of all he abominates and nothing of all he loves. I shall write, but you can tell facts, which will be better than my arguments.
