The Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell Author:Sydney Dobell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. 1840. The summer of 1840 was passed by the family at Charlton: at a small house, prettily situated in fields, and commanding fine views of hill... more » and wood, which afterwards, enlarged and improved, became the family home. Business, of course, obliged the eldest son to be chiefly in Cheltenham, but his evenings, nights, and early mornings were mostly spent in the country. ' Up at seven, fishing,' his Diary says, ' a rainy morning, but the country is beautiful anyhow.' He mentions that he himself unsaddles and beds down Rodney, the horse on which he rides to and from Cheltenham, not wishing his father to be at the expense of employing a man. ' Manfred' (great part of which he learnt by heart), Burns's ' Poems,' Priestley's ' Institutes,' an essay advocating a new Translation of the Scriptures, are noted as read about this time. Also ' a new book published by Uncle Samuel Dobell,' of which hepronounces ' the prose in some parts very good indeed, the only pity is he should be such a fool as to spoil it all by his confounded doggrel rhyme.' A little later he mentions having got hold of Defoe's ' Keligious Courtship,' which he characterises as ' a devilish old volume.' Two letters exchanged in June of this year, 1840, between Mr. Fordham and his future son-in- law indicate a good deal of the inner history of the time. Mr. Fordham, having read two or three of the letters recently received by his daughter, wrote to remonstrate on the ' painful and excessive feelings' which, he considered, they betrayed and encouraged. ' All the difference,' he asserts, between an unhappy and a happy man, and therefore between a wise and a foolish man,— lies in the proper government of our passions. . . . Religion, too, which has for its sole object the happiness of man, ab...« less