TO R. B. LITCHFIELD  , Esq.

                                                                            Glenlair, 29th May 1857.

     It is with a profound feeling of pity that I write to a denizen of Hare Court after participating in the blessings of this    splendid day. We had just enough of cloud to prevent scorching, and the grass seemed to like to grow just as   much as the beasts to eat it.

     I have not had a mathematical idea for about a fortnight, when I wrote them all away to Prof. Thomson, and I   have not got an answer yet with fresh ones. But I believe there is a department of mind conducted independent of    consciousness, where things are fermented and decocted, so that when they are run off they come clear.

     By the way, I found it useful at Aberdeen to tell the students what parts of the subject they were not to remember,    but to get up and forget at once as being rudimentary notions necessary to development, but requiring to be  sloughed off before maturity.

     I have no one with me but the domestics and dog. The valley seems deserted of its gentry; but we have one  gentleman from Dumfriesshire, who is living in a hired house, and building with great magnificence an Episcopal   Chapel in Castle-Douglas at his own expense. His own house is 20 miles off, a capital place, and this is perhaps    the least Episcopal part of Scotland by reason of the memory of the dragoons. One old family of the  Stewartry is of that persuasion, and most of the persecutors' families are now Presbyterian and Whig, so that the   congregation is but feeble.

     It is very different at Aberdeen, where the Presbyterians persecuted far more than the Prelatists, so there I actually   found a true Jacobite (female, I could not undertake to produce a male specimen), and there are three distinct Episcopal religions in Aberdeen, all pretty lively.

     Can you tell me what the illustrated Tennyson is like? I shan't see it till I go to Edinbro'. I don't mean are the prints   the best possible, or impervious to green spectacles; but are they nice diagrams as such things go? I should like to  know before long about it, and whether the characters are of the Adamic type, and in reasonable condition, or "Archetypal Skeleton" and the "Nature of  Limbs."