352 THE EETUEN FEOM INDIA 



very anxious though, and were it not that my Father would 

 feel my leaving the place, I would hang no more on in this 

 suspense. 



And in August he writes sympathetically to Bentham, 

 who was suffering from similar qualms : 



If I thought you would be a happier man I would advise 

 you to give up Botany ; but you would not be so, and evil 

 as our days are, whether they mended or worsed, it would 

 be all the worse to you to have given up what is at least a 

 wholesome and constant mental resource. I sometimes 

 despond too, but as I was once told, ' I am limed to the twig,* 

 and so are you ! Besides, you have a year's work for Cam- 

 bridge Herb.,1 and it would be dull work for you to drag 

 through that as a termination to your Bot. career. 



Sir William now made definite application for Joseph's 

 appointment as assistant to himself at the Gardens, a very 

 needful addition to the staff carried into effect in May 1855. 

 In the preceding December, after his failure to obtain one 

 of the Crown houses, Joseph Hooker had moved to a more 

 roomy house at the top of Eichmond Hill, No. 3 Montague 

 Villas ; the new appointment brought him back to a house 

 near the gates of the Gardens lately occupied by Mr. Phillipps. 

 His wife, he tells Bentham (July 3, 1855), 



is not best pleased about it ; but I tell her she may spend 

 the difference in fly-hire. As for me I am blazed or blase (or 

 whatever you call it in French) of change, and feel curiously 

 indifferent — it is all out of one's lifetime ; 



an attitude of mind parallel to that in which he had undertaken 

 the previous move, proposing to take the house 



at or about the last moment, but being at present under a 

 bad attack of Phytomania I am rather indifferent to all 

 things in general, and my prospects in particular ; it is well 

 1 should be sometimes, for I am sure I feel worried enough 

 when it does fall on my spleen. 



1 See p. 384. 



