I shall follow Vance’s plan, and am much obliged to you for reminding me of it. My attack was slight, but well for a beginning; it was of the gout family, but hardly gout itself. I will come and see you, for old friendship’s sake; but all countries will appear mean after this, and all houses comfortless after my parsonage, to which Poston House is as Sternhold and Hopkins to Lord Byron.
Read ‘Laurie Todd,’ by Galt. It is excellent; no surprising events, or very striking characters, but the humorous and entertaining parts of common life, brought forward in a tenour of probable circumstances. Read Raffles’s Life. A virtuous, active, high-minded man; placed at last where he ought to be: a round man, in a round hole.
I am going on most prosperously with my buildings. I hope to be in town by the beginning of May. Your great Duke seems, like my ankle, to be getting stronger every day. He is an excellent Minister, and bids fair to be as useful in peace as in war, and to show the utility of beating swords into pruning-hooks.
And now, Sir George, let me caution you against indulgence in that enormous appetite of yours. You eat every day as much as four men in holy orders,—yourself a layman!
