“In a week, with a fair wind, we shall be at Portsmouth, and on the 2d of July, I shall have completed (to a day) two years of peregrination, from which I am returning with as little emotion as I set out. I think, upon the whole, I was more grieved at leaving Greece than England, which I am impatient to see simply because I am tired of a long voyage.
“Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in
my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with
a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet
unbroken, I am returning home without a hope, and almost without
a desire. The first thing I shall have to encounter will be a lawyer, the next a
creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to
estates out of repair and contested coal-pits.
| 248 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1811. |
“I trust to meet, or see you, in town or at Newstead, whenever you can make it convenient—I suppose you are in love and in poetry, as usual. That husband, H. Drury, has never written to me, albeit I have sent him more than one letter;—but I dare say the poor man has a family, and of course all his cares are confined to his circle.
‘For children fresh expenses get, And Dickey now for school is fit.’ |
I regretted very much in Greece having omitted to carry the Anthology with me—I mean Bland and Merivale’s.
What has Sir Edgar done? And the Imitations and Translations—where are they? I suppose you don’t mean to let the public off so easily, but charge them home with a quarto. For me, I am ‘sick of fops and poesy and prate,’ and shall leave the ‘whole Castalian state’ to Bufo, or any body else. But you are a sentimental and sensibilitous person, and will rhyme to the end of the chapter. Howbeit I have written some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels.
“I need not repeat that shall be happy to see you. I shall be in town about the 8th, at Dorant’s Hotel, in Albemarle-street, and proceed in a few days to Notts., and thence to Rochdale on business.
