from our's-foxes very small and pretty. At Newport, R. I., I caught a Katydid bigger than any British grasshopper, but less than the Italian grillo. 'Cute thing, she shammed to be dead. At the south, from the little I have seen and the more I have heard, the men seem to be settling down quietly, but women are as fierce as ever.

TO THE REV. J. T. FOWLER.

Somerleaze, Orange Co., Virginia, December 29, 1881. I think I have sent you a printed thing or two from this continent, but I believe nothing in MS. You see that, as far as name goes, I am still at home, as my son Edgar has dutifully called his house after mine. 'Tis a lovely country, with the Blue Ridge stretching right in front like a greater Malvern. But it is very hard to get about. We shall never find fault with the worst roads in Somerset, after (December 30) what they call roads here. In fact, one has here the same privilege that they had in Scotland in the days before Marshal Wade1. Neither Grant nor Lee can share his honours-we still see the roads before they were made. 'Tis mud everywhere, in the fields also, so that it may be said of every man and every spot 'Potuit ire quo voluit cum ista terra. Each time I come back to my son's land, I bring with me parts of the estates of his neighbours cleaving to my boots. The only way that I can find to get about in any approach to comfort is by riding on a horse at the pace of a snail. To-day has come the first snow to speak of. There was a feeble attempt a fortnight back, but it is not much to speak of as yet. So hitherto we have seen nothing of the famous American winter; two days back it was such summery heat that I began to think we had somehow got rolled over into Australia.

'Tis very odd going about in a land where there are no

1 Alluding to the well-known rimes about Marshal Wade, who laid out new roads in the Highlands of Scotland after the suppression of the rebellion of 1745.

'Had you seen these roads before they were made,

You'd have held up your hands, and bless'd Marshal Wade.'

antiquities, bating a few tumps so old that you can tell nothing about them. I am sometimes tempted to wish myself in Italy again. I must some day take you to the Etruscan and Latin walls. But our standard of antiquity seems to adapt itself to circumstances. Here a house of the seventeenth or even eighteenth century, seems venerable, just as one counts things old in England which would seem new in Italy. Of the churches of all persuasions the less I tell you the better; it would vex your soul too much. There be also synagogues, but I have not visited them, though I have dined with one Jew and seen another in a train.

1

I don't know whether William Rufus is out. When I last heard of him, he was waiting for his index from Ragusa 1I found one Fiske, a professor at Ithaca, who put me up to some things about King Magnus. I found one the other day who knew of Lindesey, but did not know what I meant by distinguishing Boston in Holland from Boston, Mass. On the other hand, I have been asked whether County (gá) of Somerset was called from the Dukes thereof! I have also a tale of a lad at Harvard, whom they plucked for this, for which I should have passed him as uncommon sharp-'Why were the pontifices so called?' 'From their care of the making of bridges, as we say in English an Archbishop.'

TO PROFESSOR DAWKINS.

Virginia, December 29, 1881. Truly this is the first Christmas that we have been in Virginia; but it is not the first winter that we have been in Piedmont. I don't know whether you know this country, but that is the name which has fixed itself on the valley between this and the Blue Ridge, the main object in the scenery here. We are in a wooden house with Edgar and his Bessie and their Eleanor Lilian, Bessie's mother, brother, and half-sister, half aunt (December 30) therefore to our granddaughter, and fittingly only half the height of her whole mother. 'Tis a very fine country, and Edgar is in better quarters than I expected to find him, but

1 Where Mr. Freeman's daughter, Mrs. Evans, who made the index, was then residing.

he has a vast deal to do, and it is a trifle queer with nigger servants and the like.

... I am beginning to have a doubt on the subject of shoes. The bairn-bairn has such pretty thumbs and fingers on her hind feet, and she grasps so well with them that it seems a pity to put them in prison. But it is an anthropo whatever it is to see her in the arms of her black nurse Tabby1, and yet more in those of a Topsy girl whom Edgar calls Two Dollars.'

MY DEAR TOм,

...

TO THE REV. T. S. HOLMES 2.

Va. January 7, 1882.

I have not heard much of the working of the disestablished Church-here in Virginia it is strictly the disestablished Church; not so in Mass. and Conn. where, while they had an establishment, it was Congregational. I have seen no bishop to talk to, and only one or two presbyters. The 'rector' here has not shown himself at New Somerleaze. But I fancy they are a good bit under the thumbs of the vestrymen. The church at Rapid Ann is a poor concern, with pews which make me better understand the saying of the psalmist about the wickedness of one's heels. There is no way of arranging that part of one's frame so as to allow of kneeling, save by altogether turning one's nose the wrong way. Here they are free, as also in the ritualistic church at Baltimore; but generally all persuasions, papists and all, delight in the extreme foulness of doors, rents, brass-plates, and such like abominations, which reach their height in the old Episcopal church at Newport, R. I.

1 The infant habit of grasping with the feet is here supposed to be derived from ancestors who lived in trees and were 'anthropo' (i.e. human) somebodies. Probably the word intended, which he purposely leaves incomplete owing to his dislike of long compound technical terms, was 'anthropomorphic,' human-shaped.

2 His son-in-law, the Vicar of Wookey.

s Ps. xlix. 5, 'When the wickedness of my heels compasseth me round about.'

After what I wrote a page or two back, the parson here, Claiburne by name, came here and we rowed him about pews and singing. But I learned a thing or two. The vestry calls the rector and agrees with him for a certain salary. His tenure is formally as good as in England-permanent, subject to deprivation on any canonical offence. Practically, however, the vestry can make it very unpleasant for him, and they sometimes reduce his salary. This, however, they cannot legally do, and he can get a remedy in the civil courts. For the law regards all such engagements as contracts to be enforced. I have asked several people, judges and others, as to the relations of religious bodies (of all denominations) to the civil power. The civil courts have really-under the form of enforcing a contract-very much the same power as the King's Bench exercises in England by mandamus. People are shy of bringing, and the courts are shy of entertaining, ecclesiastical causes, but they may be and sometimes are brought. Remember that these unestablished churches hold a great deal of property in one shape or another. It seems to be usually held by the congregation as a corporate body. But among the Roman Catholics the bishop of the diocese holds everything—if I rightly understand, they have no guaranty but his good faith against his bagging it all himself.

In other letters written from Somerleaze he says

I have a good holiday here, with nothing to do but write one Fortnightly article1 and study the baby and the Turkey buzzards. 'Tis pleasant to be among fields, woods, and hills, with that grand Blue Ridge like a longer Malvern full in view whenever the haze will let us see it. I believe Eleanor has a picture of me to send. I was done both at Ithaca and Baltimore. Here I have drawn forth only a piece of word-painting, in that the blacksmith at Rapid Ann describes me as 'a jolly sturdylooking old buck.'

On Jowett's Thucydides. It appeared in the March number, 1882.

TO SIR EDWARD STRACHEy, Bart.

Schenectady, N.Y., January 25, 1882.

At Washington we abode about ten days, contemplating divers things, specially the two Houses of Congress and the Courts. I am inclined to think that there is some truth in what Andrew D. White (late United States Minister to Germany) said to me, that the Senate is as superior to the House of Lords as the House of Representatives is inferior to the House of Commons. It is likely to be so; as here the best men have every inducement to get into the Senate if they can. I have always thought it the good side of the hereditary nature of our House of Lords that it helps to keep up the character of the House of Commons. Certainly the Senate behaves very well, and the House very badly, as far as I saw them. I cannot but think that the keeping the actual members of the Government out of both Houses is a weak point, though I have heard it defended. It came into my head when I heard a member finding fault with the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Navy had no means of answering. The Supreme Court is the only body which keeps up some little pomp; the judges wear gowns, but not wigs, and come in with some little ceremony elsewhere a judge looks like another man.

We heard a piece of Guiteau's trial (Albany, January 26), which has happily come to an end since I wrote those last words. It has been a strange exhibition. I can't help fancying that most British judges and that some American judges— Gray, for instance, who has just been moved from Mass. to the Supreme Court-would have done better than Cox, but it seems to me that more fault lies with the counsel. Surely the counsel for the defence ought to have thrown up their briefs the moment Guiteau began to talk; and I am told that such would be the usual American practice also. I don't believe he was mad a bit. He knew that he was shooting a mannever mind what man—and that so to do was against the law of the land. And that is surely enough. I don't care a rap for the gabble of mad doctors. Nor can one attend to talk of divine inspiration. Ehud may have had a message from God to kill Eglon, but you could not blame a Moabite court for hanging