352 THE RETUEN 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 Hmed 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 appHcation 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 Richmond Hill, No. 3 Montague 
Vihas ; 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 hfetime ; 
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 
I should be sometimes, for I am sure I feel worried enough 
when it does fall on my spleen. 
1 See p. 384. 
