At present I have just finished (since writing _Country Stories_, which people seem so good as to like) writing all the prose (except one story about the fashionable subject of Egyptian magicians, furnished to me by your admirer, Henry Chorley; I wish you had seen him taking off his hat to the walls as I showed him your father's old residence at Heckfield), all the prose of the most splendid of the annuals, Finden's _Tableaux_, of which my longest and best story--a Young Pretender story--I have been obliged to omit in consequence of not calculating on the length of my poetical contributors.

But my poetry, especially that by that wonderful young creature Miss Barrett, Mr.Kenyon, and Mr.Procter, is certainly such as has seldom before been seen in an annual, and joined with Finden's magnificent engravings ought to make an attractive work.
"I am now going to my novel, if it please God to grant me health.

For the last two months I have only once crossed the outer threshold, and, indeed, I have never been a day well since the united effects of the tragedy and the influenza ...

[word destroyed by the seal].

What will become of that poor play is in the womb of time.