Your most kind & delightful letter, my dear Sir William met me on my return from an unexpeected & very pleasant excursion--I returned came homeyesterday from passing 3 days in London & four at Richmond--going up in the atmosphere of Calcutta & coming back in that of Greenland--but equally well & enjoying myself as much in one as in the other. This is a vaunt of the very first magnitnde--but greatly am proud of my health--because when my size is considered I think it a curiosity.--All this time was spent in seeing sights--The Exhibition where I had the honor of paying my respects to your very pretty landscape. It has a great charm to me in its originality--There was some courage in laying those enclosures before one like a map that & the success has amply repaid the daring. By the bye the Exhibition gets worse & worse. Nothing but dull faces.--To be sure Wilkie & Chantrey & Turner are well worth looking at--& I have great delight in gazing on the kindest the Niobe train in that room where nobody goes but else to be a rational thing the Royal Academy seems to want the infusion of a little fresh blood.--(Have you seen an head of Scott, which have Chantrey has just finished? The only successful likeness that has been taken of that most difficult & uncatchable countenance) The British Gallery--Oh what a treat! I thought I should never be able to get away--I will not begin to praise those protraits of great people by great Masters for fear my letter should be able to exclamation--all notes of admiration--a sort of Catalogue de raisonné which would be the least edifying possible. Did you see this charming Collection? The thing I cannot help saying--set me right if I am wrong--Reynolds does not seem to me to bear the of Vandyke--there is a want--I don't know where--but I feel it--the curious thing in the collection is that incomparably the two ugliest portraits are those of Jane Shore & Mary Queen of Scots--The state of Art at the time accounts for the first & besides no Painter on earth could ever have been able to give the style of beauty implied by Shakespear's loveliest of all lovely sketches--"A pretty goot, a cherry lip, a passing pleasing,tongue"--but that they did not get the Bodleian Mary is quite astonishing especially as they had portraits from Oxford. To be sure where was not much to be expected from a set of Directors who affronted Sir W. W. Wynne by refusing to put in Ramsay's bad but interesting picture of Prince Charles Edward under any other name than that of the Pretender--Was not this a prodigious want of commonsense in the year 1820 when there is nothing like a Stuart left? Princess Charlotte's Cenotaph--Did you see that? Great want of Common sense there too--Common sense a very rare gift! To think of that marble soul flying away from that marble body! Two Princess Charlotte's--one lying--the other in the air! To think of that in all the tangibility of solid marble--where nothing like illustion can be maintained really makes one stare again--It's a pity, for there is much prettiness if there were anything real or possible--What a different affair Chantrey would have made of it!--4 Miss Kelly's acting--for one say's nothing of the rest of the tribe--what a charming creature she is--so perfectly true so fancy, so so sulky, so jaunty--so fine a compound of all the good & evil of a lady's maid--She deserved to live in Colley Cibber's days & that he should have written an account of her.--% Haydon's Pictures--You won't say what you think on that subject--But you may very safely--I shan't tell him--I never shew your letters my dear Sir William, & as to saying any thing in the way of blame to that worthy & delightful personage I never do--because I know he can't bear it. Goodness me! He I knock down with a look.--Seriously, do you like the head of Christ? This is the question every body asks--for about composition expression colouring there seems no doubt--but do you like the Head of Christ?--I did not at first--but it gained upon me though I still think it rather too large & too pale--& with too much glory about it--& too little of mere mortal beauty. Still the conception, the abstractedness the looking forward & inward, all this is very grand--very grand indeed.--He is now painting another great picture--the resurrection of Lazarus different from any of the many paintings on this subject. All the other pictures represent Lazarus as rising from a horizontal position--Mr. Haydon following the custom of Jerusalem where the tombs were excavations from the holoow in which he had been enclozed & throwing off the grave clothes at the Command of Christ "Lazarus Come forth!"--Nothing can be finer than the sketch which I have seen, it contains about 20 figures & will occupy I suppose nearly 2 years.--Mr. Haydon himself spent a day with the friends at whose house I was staying at Richmond--I never saw any one in such health & spirits--enjoying most honestly his well earned success.--These with some lesser sights, shopping, calling, & driving about to look at streets & Parks pretty well filled up my London days--three sighted I missed--Lord Grosvenor's Fathers of the Church by Rubens--(which I lost by going to Richmond the day before they were shewn)--the Queen Queen Caroline--& Mrs. Opie--that pretty excellent & ridiculous personage who is now placed in Bond Street (where she can't even hear herself talk) with a blue hat & feathers on her head--a low gown--without a tucker--& ringlets hanging down on each shoulder. These sights I lost but the first & the last I hope to see again--& the second I don't care if I never see at all--for be it known to you my dear Friend that I am no Queen's woman--whatever my party may be--I have no toleration for an indecorous woman--& I am exceedingly scandlized at the quantity of nonsense which has been talked in her defense. The less that is said on the subject the better-- It is no small part of her guilt or her folly that her arrival has turned conversation into a charnel of scandal & detraaction on either side which if it continue threatens to infuse the taste the purity the moral character of the nation. Don't you agree with me? For my part I had rather talk about Richmond. Do you know much of that Fairylnd which has so little to do with the work a day work & seems made for a holiday spot for ladies & gentlemen--a sort of realization of Watteau's pictures--The Hill is grown rather too leafy--too much like Glover's pictures--too green--it wants crags, as Canova says & really looked better when I saw it last in the winter--but the water & the banks are beyond all praise00The House where I was staying had a beautiful garden down to the river & there or on the water I quite lived. We went to see Pope's grotto--which is unchanged except in the addition of some china plates stuck about the wall--Strawberry Hill--which is likewise a sad China Shop, but where I walked about amongst the finery in a very pleasant reverie thinking of Horace & of my Walpole & his Correspondents--Horace the Second--Hampton Court which I wonder to see so deserted. What a beautiful Palace! How can any body leave Hampton Court & live in the Pavilion! My enjoyment there was very perfect--The Cartoons which I had never see together before, though every one knows them by heart by copies & drawings & prints & seeing them by twos at the British Gallery--the Cartoons & Titian's Portrait of himself formed by great delight.--Kew Palace--I was much gratified there too though in a very different way--The simplicity, the homeliness, the shabbiness even of that royal dwelling where there is nothing good but books & pictures formed a pleasing contrast to the common notion of courts--I am sure there is scarcely a Country gentleman of my acquaintance who would be content with such furniture--The most astonishing things in the Palace are a bust of the present Queen which one wonders not to see removed--& a x portrait of himself by Vandyke which I prefer even to the Titian. What a glorious race of beings those great Painters were! What spirit! What grace! What intellectual beauty! Where shall we find three such men as Titian Vandyke & Raphael?--You will think me picture mad--& really I do love pictures better than any thing else in the world except flowers & books & greyhounds, & fresh air--& old friends. I will only tell you two things more of paintings & have done. The one that Mr. Hofland is about a landscape, a gala day at Richmond which promises to be his best, combining that beautiful scenery with the out of door gaiety which is so rare in our climate & still rarer in our Arts--& that at an old house at Richmond they have rummaged out three pictures which had lain unsuspected in a garret for I don't know how many years--George the Second between Queen Caroline his Queen & Lady Suffolk--you have no idea of the interest they excited, not on their own account for they are bad or on the account royal but solely & purely because they revalled the ide of Jeanie Deans--What I admired most at Richmond was Lord Dysart's place--Did you see it ever? It is of the style of Charles the First or the Commonwealth--a bad style but so preserved so perfect, the keeping is so complete--there is the grand heavy stately quiet house, far from the water--screened by trees which keep off the light & glare--the ha ha which parts the court from the lawn the heavy grated iron grate, though which one cn almost fancy Lovelace slipping a letter to Clarissa--the busts, the balconies, the terraces--the fountains the oldfashioned flower garden full of old fashioned flowers--trim pinks & old Cabbage roses--no new fangled flaunting Azelias or China roses--nothing that can counteract the gloom & the silence & the perfect repose. I know nothing at all of Lord Dysart but I honour him & his progenitors for resisting the temptation to alter & preserving so fine a specimen of the residence of our ancestors.--Well now I have done. My dear Sir William laud the Gods that there is no danger of my going to France or Italy, what would become of you if I were to take a journey of that sort when I cannot even make a trip to Richmond without inflicting on you my seeings & doings.--I heard very little literary news--Every body is talking of Marcian Colonna Barry Cornwall's new Poem--Now Barry Cornwall is an Alias. The Poet's real name is Proctor a young Attorney who feared it might hurt his practice if he were known to follow this "idel trade"--It has however become very generally known, & poor Mr. Proctor is terribly embarrassed with his false name--he neither knows how to keep it on or throw it off. By whattever appellation he chuses to be called he is a great Poet.--Poor John Keats is dying of the Quarterley Review--there is a sad silly thing but it is true. A young delicate imaginative boy that withering article fell upon him like an East wind--I am afraid he has no chance for recovery--Mr. Gifford's behaviour is very bad--He sent word that if he wrote again it would be properly reviewed which was admitting the falsity of the first critique & yet says that he has been Keats's besst friend because somebody sent him 20 £ tp console him for the injusstice of the Quarterly. I am very sorry for John Keats--he had a thousand faults & a million of beauties--& he is struck to the earth by the mere effect of worldly hardness & derision upon a tender heart & a sensitive temper. I am very sorry for John Keats.--Miss Porter is sick too of the her condemned Plays--I have not much pity for her--Her disease is wounded vanity--an old Stager & an old dealer in magnanimity ought to know better. All my pity is for poor John Keats--Did you ever see his Endymion? It is thd easiest thing in the world to laugh at it--but there are passages which could hardly be equalled by any living Poet--And he was so young--so likely to improve--Are you not sorry for him? I met with a great curiosity whilst I was absent--a young lady trained up on the house & ;the steps of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter by her nephew the Revd. Montague Pennington the Godson of Mrs. Montagu (Does not the family of this name for a prig match with the names & dates of your American billet?) The young lady was nineteen in age--& ninety in manner--I never saw so complete a specimen of what one calls in Children "an old woman cut shorter"--always talking the Carter wisdom except when tempted to deviate into the Montagu wit--a very good sort of little body--but so tiresome that one yawned instinctively when she came into a room & felt as if a sheet of lead was removed from one's temples when she went out. I hope never to see another wise person as long as I live.