chiefly the internal history of England, beginning at the fifteenth century. It would be a work for my life, and eight Lectures a year would be, I am sure, as much as any man could give with advantage. My present course will be introductory, on the method of reading History; and this too, will consist of eight Lectures. Now I am willing to go on with the present regulations, if the University think it advisable, provided always, that I am required to take no oath about them; because then as much of the salary may be forfeited now, as the Vice-Chancellor may think proper, and the question of reducing the number of Lectures may be considered at leisure, before I come to leave Rugby. But feeling earnestly desirous to do the duty of the Professorship efficiently, and believing that I can do it, I think I may ask the sanction of the University authorities for an application to the Government about the regulations, to have them altered as regards the number of Lectures, and, I think, also, to take away the oath, if such a thing be not required of other Professors. In the last century, there was a sad recklessness in requiring oaths on all occasions worthy or unworthy; but there is a better feeling now prevalent and I should hope to show that

without the oath the duty might be done effectually.

In the mean time this uncertainty is very inconvenient, because we have actually engaged our house in Oxford, and I shall have enough to do to finish my Lectures in time, if they are wanted, and, if they are not wanted, I can ill afford the time to work upon them. But this cannot be helped, only the oath is a serious matter; and if I am required to take it to the regulations attached to my patent, I have no alternative but to refuse it most positively. We are all well here, and have the most beautiful weather; the mountain tops all covered with snow, and all their sides and the valleys rich with the golden ferns and the brown leaves of the oaks.

[The regulations in question were found not to be in force.]

CCXCI. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Fox How, December 31, 1841.

[After explaining the difficulties about the Professorship.] I do not like undertaking more than I can do, or being thought to do the work of my place inefficiently. And I would rather give up the Professorship a hundred times than be thought to make a job of it. Yet I do value it very much, and look forward to having great parties of the young men of the various great schools with no small pleasure. I shall ask our Rugby men to bring their friends of other schools, when they are good men. And I hope to see some of my boys and girls well bogged in the middle of Bagley Wood. It is the last night of the year. May the new year begin and go on happily with us both, and I think that at our age, we begin to feel that the word "happy" has no light meaning, and requires more than mere worldly prosperity or enjoyment to answer to its signification. Our family greetings to all yours.

CCXCII. TO THE SAME.

Fox How, January 9, 1842.

I have nearly finished six Lectures, although I scarcely

know whether I shall deliver them. If I do go up to Oxford, many

things, I can assure you, have been in my thoughts, which I wished gradually to call men's attention to; one in particular, which seems to me a great scandal, the debts contracted by the young men, and their backwardness in paying them. I think that no part of this evil is to be ascribed to the tradesmen, because so completely are the tradesmen at the mercy of the undergraduates, that no man dares refuse to give credit; if he did, his shop would be abandoned. The Colleges take care to secure themselves by requiring caution money, and other expedients; and I cannot but think, that their authority might be exerted to compel payment to tradesmen with nearly the same regularity, as they exact their own battells.

CCXCIII. TO THE REV. J. HEARN.

Fox How, January 17, 1842.

I do not like to leave your kind letters unanswered, lest you should think that I am indifferent to receiving them, which would be most far from the truth; and yet I have been so busy, and still am, that it not only makes it difficult to find time to write letters, but it makes them not worth reading when they are written, because it so engrosses me with one or two pursuits that it leaves me nothing to communicate which can be of interest to others. Next week, I suppose, our life will have variety and excitement enough, when we go up to Oxford, with all our family, and are established at our house in Beaumont Street, which we have taken for three weeks. Nevertheless, I prefer writing from the delicious calm of this place, where the mountains raise their snowy tops into the clear sky by this dim twilight, with a most ghost-like solemnity; and nothing is heard, far or near, except the sound of the stream through the valley. I have been walking to-day to Windermere, and went out on a little rude pier of stones into the lake, to watch what is to me one of the most beautiful objects in nature, the life of blue water amidst a dead landscape of snow; the sky was bright, and the wind fresh, and the lake was dancing and singing, as it were, while all along its margin lay the dead snow, covering every thing but the lake,-plains and valleys and mountains. I have admired the same thing more than once by the sea side, and there the tide gives another feature in the broad band of brown shingles below high-water mark, interposed between the snow and the water. We have been here more than three weeks, and, as it always does, the place has breathed a constant refreshment on me, although I have never worked harder; having done six of my Lectures, besides a large correspondence about the school matters, as usual in the holidays. I have, in all, written seven Lectures, and leave one more to be written in Oxford, and this last week I hope to devote to my History.. We have been all well, and as my children grow up, we are so large and companionable a party, that we need no society out of ourselves. This is a great change in later married life, when your table is always full without company, and you live in the midst of a large party. And I am sure that its effect is to make you shrink from other society, which is not wanted to enliven you, and which, added to a large family in the house, becomes almost fatiguing.

I will say nothing of my deep interest in this Oxford election, and in the progress of the Newmanite party, on which so many seem to look

either complacently or stupidly, who yet cannot really sympathize with it. But I shall see and hear enough, and more than enough, of all this during my stay in Oxford.. I half envy you your farming labours, and wish you all manner of success in them. I could enter with great delight into planting, but I am never here at the right season, and at Rugby I have neither the time nor the ground.

CCXCIV. TO REV. HERBERT HILL.

Oxford, Febrary 9, 1842.

If Mrs. Nichols' is alive and sensible, both my wife and I would wish to give her our affectionate remembrances. I can quite feel what you say, as to the good of sitting by, and watching her patience. It is a great lesson to learn how to die. Our stay here has even surpassed my expectations, and the country is more beautiful than my recollections, but my keen enjoyment of it makes me satisfied that my dislike of the Rugby country proceeds from no fond contrast with Westmoreland, but from its own unsurpassable dulness. I was to-day in the valley behind S. Hinksey, and in the thickets of Bagley Wood. I went up to town to see the King of Prussia at Bunsen's, and there met both Maurice and Carlyle. We go down on Friday. All join in kindest regards to Mrs. Hill, and in love to the babies, begging Katie's pardon for the affront of so calling her.

CCXCV. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (K.)

Oxford, February 9, 1842.

I think the question of the expediency of your residing for some time at Oxford is rather difficult. But on the whole, unless you have same special object in coming here which I do not know, I think that I should advise against it. This place appears, at this moment, to be overridden with one only influence, which is so predominant that one must either yield to it, or be living in a state of constant opposition to those around one, a position not very agreeable. Besides, are you not already engaged more usefully both to yourself and others, than you could be here, and reading what you do read in a healthier atmosphere ? I say this, but yet there is not a man alive who loves this place better than I do, and I have enjoyed our fortnight's stay here even more than I expected. I have been in no feuds or controversies, and have met with nothing but kindness; but then my opinions are so well known, that they are allowed for as a matter of course, so that my difficulty here is less than that of most men. We go down to Rugby on Friday, when the school meets. It always give me real pleasure to hear from you, nor would I answer you so briefly if I were not overwhelmed with work of various kinds, which leaves me not a moment to spare, insomuch that Rugby will be almost a relaxation.

CCXCVI. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Rugby, March 3, 1842.

[After speaking of the statutes of the Professorship.] What the University itself drew up so lately, and which has never been more than 1) A poor woman near Fox How.

an utter dead letter, may, I should think, be well altered by the University now. But this I should wish to leave entirely to the Heads of Houses, never having had the slightest wish to ask any thing of the Government as a personal favour to myself, and still less any thing which the University did not think desirable. I shall write again to Hawkins immediately, and, if the University wishes things to remain in statu quo, even let it be so. If they do not tender the oath, which I do not think they will, I shall not think of resigning, and they may deal with the salary as they think proper. But, after the experience which I had this term, nothing shall induce me to resign so long as I can lawfully hold the place, and so long as the University itself does not wish me to give it up. Our stay in Oxford more than realized all my hopes in every way. not mean the attendance on the Lectures, gratifying as that was, but the universal kindness which was shown to us all, down to Fan and Walter, and the hearty delight with which I went over my old walks with the children, and seemed to be commencing residence once again.

CCXCVII. TO ARCHDEACON HARE.

I do

Rugby, March 18, 1842.

I thank you very much for your Charge, and for the kind mention of my name, and the sanction given to what I have said, which you have added in the notes. I think it likely that if I were in your situation, or in any similar office in the Church, my sense of the good to be done, even under the present system, and of the necessity of being myself not idle, would lead me to a view perhaps more exactly agreeing with your own. As it is, I feel so deeply the danger and evil of the false Church system, that despairing of seeing the true Church restored, I am disposed to cling, not from choice, but necessity, to the Protestant tendency of laying the whole stress on Christian Religion, and adjourning the notion of Church sine die. But I have no time to trouble you with my notions,

and you have better things to do than to read them.

CCXCVIII.

*

TO THE REV. H. FOX. (Now settled as a Missionary in India.)

Rugby, April 10, 1842.

I thank you very much for your letter, which gave me a very comfortable account of you and yours. Be assured that I shall be always very thankful to you for writing; nor will I fail to answer your letters; only you will remember that I write at a disadvantage, having nothing to communicate to you from a country which you know as well as I do, to be compared with the interest of your communications, which must be full of new information to one who has never been in India. I suppose1 that the late events in Cabul must have produced a strong sensation all over India. They are deeply to be regretted, and very painful to me so far as I know about them, because they seem to have been brought on by such sad misconduct. Otherwise, the magnitude of their consequences

1)" It gives me a pain I cannot describe," he said in one of his latest conversations, "to hear of all this misery which I have no power to alleviate. Yet it will be as it was with the Romans in Spain; we hear often of cæsus consul cum legionibus,' but then the next year another consul and new legions go out, just as before."

seems to be overrated by many people; the Indian Empire, I believe, will stand no less securely, and will have the opportunity, whether employed or wasted, of doing great things for the welfare of Asia.

There must be a great interest in having to deal with minds, whose training has been so different from our own, though it would be to me a great perplexity. I should think its tendency would be at first to make one skeptical, and then, if that was overcome, to make one fanatical. I mean that it must be startling at first to meet with many persons holding as truths, things the most opposite from what we believe, and even so differing from us in their appreciation of evidence. And first, this would incline one, I should think, to mistrust all truth, or to think that it was subjective merely, one truth for Europe, and another for India; then, if this feeling were repelled, there would be the danger of maintaining a conclusion which yet one did not feel one could satisfactorily prove,-the resolving that a thing shall be believed by the mind, whether reasonably or unreasonably. I should earnestly, I think, look out in a Hindoo's mind for those points which he had in common with us, and see if the enormous differences might not be explained, and their existence accounted for. In this way I have always believed in the existence of a moral sense amongst all men, in spite of the tremendous differences in the notions of different ages and countries as to right and wrong. I think these differences may be explained, and that they do not disprove a common idea of and appreciation of virtue, as consisting mainly in self-denial and love. But all this will have presented itself to you often, and mine is but hypothesis, for my sole acquaintance has been with European minds, trained more or less in the same school.

You would be glad to hear of the flourishing state of Rugby. Highton is permanently settled here as a Master. The school have subscribed £130 for another window in the chapel, and Frank Penrose has looked at the roof, and given us a plan for getting rid of the flat roof, which has long been my great enemy. Of other news, I know none so good as that Clough is just elected at Oriel, which all his friends are most rejoiced at.

I hear flourishing accounts of New Zealand, and Bishop Selwyn, who is gone out there, seems to be just the man for such a place, very active and very zealous. I suppose that you will see Tucker ere long, as I find he is returned to Madras. We are doing Elphinstone's History of India in the Sixth, for our Modern History on Thursdays, as I wished to make the fellows know something of India, of which they knew next to nothing. It is a pity that Elphinstone had not a more profound knowledge of the ancient western world, which continually illustrates and is illustrated by the state of things in India. God bless you, my dear Fox, and prosper your work. I must beg you to offer my very kind regards to Mrs. Fox, and I rejoiced to hear of the birth of your little boy.

ССХСІХ. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN.

Rugby. May 3, 1842. Since our return from Oxford, we have been living in a quiet, which offers a curious contrast to your life in London. We have seen fewer people than usual; and as I hardly ever read a newspaper, our thoughts have been very much kept within the range of our little