260 PRÆTERITA-II

sorrowfully silenced by his anxiety for my life. Once or twice the short cough, and mouth-taste-it was no more- of blood, returned; but my mother steadily maintained there was nothing serious the matter, and that I only wanted rest and fresh air. The doctors, almost unanimously,-Sir James Clark¹ excepted,-gave gloomier views. Sir James cheerfully, but decidedly, ordered me abroad before autumn, to be as much in open carriages as possible, and to winter in Italy.

And Mr. Telford consented to sit in the counting-house, and the clerks promised to be diligent; and my father, to whom the business was nothing, but for me, left his desk, and all other cares of life, but that of nursing me.

18. Of his own feelings, he said little; mine, in the sickly fermentation of temper I was in, were little deserving of utterance, describable indeed less as feelings than as the want of them, in all wholesome directions but one; -magnetic pointing to all presence of natural beauty, and to the poles of such art and science as interpreted it. My preparations for the journey were made with some renewal of spirit, my mother was steadily, bravely, habitually cheerful; while my father, capable to the utmost of every wise enjoyment in travelling, and most of all, of that in lovely landscape, had some personal joy in the thought of seeing South Italy. The attacks of the throat cough seemed to have ceased, and the line of our journey began to be planned with some of the old exultation.

That we might not go through Paris, the route was arranged by Rouen and the Loire to Tours, then across France by Auvergne, and down the Rhone to Avignon; thence, by the Riviera and Florence, to the South.

19. “And is there to be no more Oxford?” asks Froude, a little reproachfully, in a recent letter concerning these memoranda; for he was at Oriel while I was at Christ Church, and does not think I have given an exhaustive view either of the studies or manners of the University in our day.

¹ [Sir James Clark (1788-1870), court physician; created baronet 1837.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]