would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q.E.D.

Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of
conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also
where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes,
the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly
compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that
of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book--"The Second
Funeral of Napoleon"? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy
it, as each copy sold puts 7-1/2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty
just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done.
What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last
Review! The last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe
but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The
electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth
fires away about the Odes of Pindar, and Donne is very æsthetic about
Mr. Hallam's book. What is the meaning of "exegetical"? Till I know
that, how can I understand the Review?

Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates
as I knew in the days before they "assumed the purple." I am reading
Gibbon, and see nothing but this d----d colour before my eyes. It
changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial
colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (_vide_ Coleridge and
Eastlake's "Goethe")--even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are
antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same
(_vide_ Coleridge, etc.). Is this æsthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad
I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and
begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to
this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay,