Letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Alexander William Mowbray Baillie, discussing his meeting with Baillie's cousin, Mrs. Cunliffe; his impending trip to Wales; his visit to the Junior Water Colours and the British Institution; etc.

They, I mean the shepherd and fam ily, gorged me with eggs and bacon and oaten cake and curds and whey. Thus I did what old gentlemen tell you with a sort of selfish satis faction that you must learn to do,

ROUGHED IT;

I believe it means irritating the skin on sharp-textured blankets. These old gentlemen have always had to do it when they were your age.

Your P.F. has a hard time of it to resist contamination from the bawdy jokes and allusions of Bond and Hardy.

We have four Miss Storys staying in the house, girls from Reading. This is a great advantage - but not to reading.

I have been reading Sophocles with Herr mann's notes which are laborious beyond everything, but a great clue to scholarship I find. I am in misery about my first.

I have written a lot of my Pulate. I am thinking of a Judas, but such a subject is rather beyond me at present. I have added several stanzas to Floris in Italy but it gets on very slowly. I have nearly finished an answer to Miss Rossetti's Convent Threshold, to be called A Voice from the World, or something like that, with which I am present in the fatal condition of satisfaction. I have written three religious poems which however you would not at all enter into, they

being of a very Catholic character. Also The Lover's Stars (a trifle in something like Coventry Patmore's style), and a thing which I hope you will like, a soliloquy of one of the spies left in the wilderness, and the beginning of a story to be called Richard, and some other fragments. So, though I finish nothing, I am not idle. I am thinking, on account of the nobility of the subject, of writing for the Latin Verse after Mods, but not of course with a view to success. It came to pass very happily for me that I shewed several things to Bond; used though I am to conceal what I write except from you, for what he said, though he gave me no especial praise, was of such a kind that I have had great confidence since, such as I never felt at all before. I hope, dear Baillie, you will not

think me too egotistical in speaking thus at length and thus freely ab out myself and my hopes. I have now a more rational hope than be fore of doing something - in poetry and painting. About the first I have said all there is to say in a letter; about the latter I have no more room to speak, but when next I see you I have great things to tell you. I have been introduced to Miss and Miss Christina Rossetti. I met them and Holman Hunt and George Mac Donald and Peter Cunningham and Jenny Lind at the Gurneys'.

Hardy wishes you would look sharp and answer his letter, and sends his love.

Believe me, my dear friend, yours affectionately, Gerard M. Hopkins.

P.S. "Nothing so true as what you once let fall", life is a preparation for Mods.