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WW would like JCH's judgement on a matter concerning the son of Lord Monteagle [Aubrey Richard Spring Rice]. He has taken his degree and intends to take orders but is only 21. He needs advice on the best way to prepare for ministerial office during the next two years. Should he go to theological college or attach himself to some clergyman as a sort of lay curate? WW is giving his 5th course of lectures on morals to a considerable audience. Unfortunately Henry Taylor's life of Southey will be delayed due to his ill health. WW does not envy Taylor's task of ploughing through Southey's considerable archive of letters: 'Taylor appears from the book to be a man of more ability than I was aware of'. WW still has 'a hankering after etymology. Do you not think that when you and I grow old and are released from the heavier business of life we might re-establish the Etymological Society and work out some of our old plans? I do not see that the Philological Society is likely to supercede our labours'.

48 letters to W. H. Thompson dated 1831-1866, and 1 letter addressed to [John] Allen dated 24 Aug. 1840. Names mentioned in the accompanying calendar of the letters include Henry Alford; John Allen; Robert Leslie Ellis; Edward FitzGerald; Arthur Hallam; Walter Savage Landor; Samuel Laurence; Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton; Stephen Spring Rice; Sir Henry Taylor; Robert John Tennant; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Tennyson [later Turner]; and William Wordsworth. Spedding also refers to his work on Francis Bacon.
With a further 35 letters to William Aldis Wright and William George Clark, dated 1862-1881. Letters to William George Clark date from 1862 to 1864 and relate to collations of Shakespeare's plays. Letters from 1881 to William Aldis Wright relate to Frederick James Furnivall, with copies of Spedding's letters to Furnivall, and one letter from Furnivall to Spedding dated 26 Feb. 1881. Accompanied by a mechanical copy of the Northumberland Manuscript.

Embossed notepaper, '66 Eaton Square'. - Had bought Monographs, but is delighted with keepsake copy; cannot locate original from which translation of Heine is taken; has Houghton followed Mrs Browning's example in her Sonnets from the Portuguese? Postscript: encloses verses after Heine 'by a girl'.

Downing Street. - Presents Milnes with a copy of The Virgin Widow.

173: Printed appeal on behalf of Henry Thompson, [1830s], endorsed by Henry Taylor.

HT is pleased WW likes his play: 'I am glad of all the praise I can get and especially of yours'. He has not seen WW's book of Hexameters: 'I remember well the pleasure I had in Hermann and Dorothea [WW's translation of 'Goethe's Herman and Dorothea', Fraser's Magazine, 1850]'. However 'it is not a measure which I should wish to see much of in any poetry'. He has just been reading John Herschel's translation of the first book of the Iliad - 'skillful and beautiful as the versification is I would rather have had it in decasyllabic blank verse of the same quality - not indeed in Cowper's blank verse, for if the hexameter movement is too marked, Cowper's verse on the other hand is almost motionless. But if Homer could be rendered into such blank verse as was written in the Elizabethan age or by Milton...that being a kind of melody in which almost all other melodies and movements are contained'.

Thanks WW for sending him the Supplement [probably 'The Influence of the History of Science upon Intelectual Education', 1854]: 'I find myself deep in Ethics and Metaphysics I feel as if I had got back into my youth - for many years are gone since I read anything in that line'. He is pleased to hear that Cordelia Whewell's health is improving.

Thanks WW for his book [probably 'Notes on the Oxford University Bill in Reference to the Colleges at Cambridge', 1854]: 'I find it exceedingly interesting'. Does WW 'recollect a remarkable passage in Shakespere (Hamlet act 1. Sc: 4) in which he points to the division of moral attributes into inborn and circumstantial'.

HT presents his compliments to WW for the 'Verse Translations from the German'.