Ever yours, M.R.M.

    Swallowfield, November 25, 1852.

My Dear Friend:  Your most kind and welcome letter arrived to-day, two days after the papers, for which I thank you much.  Still more do I thank you for that kind and charming letter, and for its enclosures.  The anonymous poem [it was by Dr. T.W.  Parsons] is far finer than anything that has been written on the death of the Duke of Wellington, as indeed it was a far finer subject.  May I inquire the name of the writer?  Mr. Everett’s speech also is superb, and how very much I prefer the Marshfield funeral in its sublime simplicity to the tawdry pageantry here!  I have had fifty letters from persons who saw the funeral in St. Paul’s, and seen as many who saw that or the procession, and it is strange that the papers have omitted alike the great successes and the great failures.  My young neighbor, a captain in the Grenadier Guards (the Duke’s regiment), saw the uncovering the car which had been hidden by the drapery, and was to have been a great effect, and he says it was exactly what is sometimes seen in a theatre when one scene is drawn up too soon and the other is not ready.  Carpenters and undertaker’s men were on all parts of the car, and the draperies and ornaments were everywhere but in their places.  Again, the procession waited upwards of an hour at the cathedral door, because the same people had made no provision for taking the coffin from the car; again, the sunlight was let into St. Paul’s, mingling most discordantly with the gas, and the naked wood of screens and benches and board beams disfigured the grand entrance.  In three months’ interval they had not time!  On the other hand, the strong points were the music, the effect of which is said to have been unrivalled; the actual performance of the service,—­my friend Dean Milman is renowned for his manner of reading the funeral service, he officiated at the burial of Mrs. Lockhart (Sir Walter’s favorite daughter),—­and none who were present could speak of it without tears; the clerical part of the procession, which was a real and visible mourning pageant in its flowing robes of white with black bands and sashes; the living branches of laurel and cypress amongst the mere finery; and, above all, the hushed silence of the people, always most and best impressed by anything that appeals to the imagination or the heart.

I suppose you will have seen how England is flooded, and you will like to hear that this tiny speck has escaped.  The Lodden is over the park, and turns the beautiful water meadows down to Strathfieldsaye into a no less beautiful lake, two or three times a week; but then it subsides as quickly as it rises, so there is none of the lying under water which results in all sorts of pestilential exhalations, and this cottage is lifted out of every bad influence, nay, a kind neighbor having had my lane scraped, I walk dry-shod every afternoon a mile and a half, which is more than I ever expected