LETTERS. 32i 



spend a few days with you at Clapham, and to rhapsodize 

 on your common. It gives me pleasure to hear you are 

 settled, and I give you many hearty good wishes for prac- 

 tice and prosperity. I hope you will soon find that a wife 

 is a very necessary article of enjoyment in a domesticated 

 state ; for how indeed should it be otherwise ? A man 

 cannot cook his dinner while he is employed in earning it. 

 Housekeepers are complete helluones rei familiaris, and 

 not only pick your pockets, but abuse you into the bargain. 

 While a wife, on the contrary, both cooks your dinner, and 

 enlivens it with her society ; receives you after the toils 

 of the day with cheerfulness and smiles, and is not only the 

 faithful guardian of your treasury, but the soother of your 

 cares, and the alleviator of your calamities. Now, am 

 I not very poetical ? But on such a subject who would 

 not be poetical ? A wife ! — a domestic fire-side ! — the 

 cheerful assiduities of love and tenderness ! It would 

 inspire a Dutch burgomaster ! and if, with all this in 

 your grasp, you shall still choose the puisare terrain 

 pede Ubero, still avoid the irrupta copula, still deem it 

 a matter of light regard to be an object of affection and 

 fondness to an amiable and sensible woman, why theji 

 vou deserve to be a fellow of a college all your days ; to 

 be kicked about in your last illness by a saucy and care- 

 less bed- maker; and, lastly, to be put in the ground in 

 your college chapel, followed only by the man who is to 

 be your successor. Why, man, I dare no more dream 

 that I shall ever have it in my power to have a wife, 

 than that I shall be Archbishop of Canterbury, and 

 Primate of all England. A suite of rooms in a still and 

 quiet corner of old St John's, which was once occupied 

 by a crazy monk, or by one of the translators of the 

 Bible in the days of good King James, must form the 

 boundary of my ambition. I must be content to inhabit 

 walls which never echoed with a female voice— to be 

 buried in glooms which were never cheered with a female 

 smile. It is said, indeed, that women were sometimes 

 permitted to visit St John's, when it was a monastery of 

 W^hite Friars, in order to be present at particular reli- 

 gious ceremonies ; but the good monks were careful to 



