Item 7 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

26 Colville Road (Bayswater).—Does not think it would benefit him to give up his College work next term. In the summer he and Lucy plan to spend the summer in the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees.

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Transcript

26 Colville Road. Ap 7/76

My dearest Fred

I think you are the truest friend in the world, and that everybody is always ready to help me who never helped anybody. But I am sure that to give up my College work of next term would do me much more harm than good; I should continually fret about it and about one or two little things I want to finish, and rest from work is no use at all without rest from worry. I am already picked up under Andrew Clarke’s regimen; shall get a clear fortnight’s holiday in the country from next Wednesday; {1} and there is then only five weeks’ easy work in warm weather. After that we will go in a Cunard boat round the Mediterranean for seven weeks, and then stay as long a time in the Pyrenees; which is enough to set up the Vendôme column. {2} Moreover it seems better to be under A.C.’s eye for a little while yet. If it were winter and one could get away into a warm place it would be a different thing; but I shall be as strong as a horse before the next cold weather. I don’t believe that too great or too sudden a change of life can be good except in very bad cases, and there is really not much the matter with me. Besides that it is enough to make any man well at once to think that he has such friends.

Thy
Willi.

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{1} 12 April.

{2} The Vendôme column in Paris, surmounted by a statue of Napoleon, had been taken down on 8 May 1871, during the Commune, at the instigation of the painter Gustave Courbet. On 26 June 1874 Courbet and his colleagues were condemned to defray the cost of rebuilding it, whereupon the artist, unable to pay, fled to Switzerland. The task of reconstruction was completed in December 1875. The phrase 'set up' is probably used in the two senses ‘restore the health of’ and ‘erect’.