I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you,
I'll undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all,
Master Tom, it is not the very exact _finale_ which we should have
expected to your Republicanism of the last three or four years, to
find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment!

Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news.
What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each
other!

I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many
thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world
whom I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But
I dare say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "_longum
intervallum"_ between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month
in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most
entire absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most
kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel
grateful, yet our intercourse was that of man and boy; and though
the difference of years was not so formidable as between "Matthew"
and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a "pair of Friends,"
though a pair of very loving brothers.

But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadows
cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been
"delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the
heat.

The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting