Dear Dyer,--I would have written before to thank you for your kind
letter, written with your own hand. It glads us to see your writing. It
will give you pleasure to hear that, after so much illness, we are in
tolerable health and spirits once more. Miss Isola intended to call upon
you after her night's lodging at Miss Buffam's, but found she was too
late for the stage. If she comes to town before she goes home, she will
not miss paying her respects to Mrs. Dyer and you, to whom she desires
best love. Poor Enfield, that has been so peaceable hitherto, that has
caught an inflammatory fever, the tokens are upon her; and a great fire
was blazing last night in the barns and haystacks of a fanner about half
a mile from us. Where will these things end? There is no doubt of its
being the work of some ill-disposed rustic; but how is he to be
discovered? They go to work in the dark with strange chemical
preparations unknown to our forefathers. There is not even a dark
lantern to have a chance of detecting these Guy Fauxes. We are past the
iron age, and are got into the fiery age, undream'd of by Ovid. You are
lucky in Clifford's Inn, where, I think, you have few ricks or stacks
worth the burning. Pray keep as little corn by you as you can, for fear
of the worst.

It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate
upon their condition. Formerly they jogged on with as little reflection
as horses; the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother
that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather
breeches; and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his
magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half the country is grinning
with new fires. Farmer Graystock said something to the touchy rustic
that he did not relish, and he writes his distaste in flames. What a
power to intoxicate his crude brains, just muddlingly awake, to perceive
that something is wrong in the social system; what a hellish faculty