MS West Devon Area Record Office Acc No 308
My dear Mary
I was obliged to let the Guardian go that week before I had really read it, but it must be a mistake for our dear Charles cannot be referred to in Bp Wordsworths Christian Boyhood, as it was published before his death.1 I know he had a copy full of marks of his own. There is a note in the book about the poet Bowles and the habits at Winchester, and I think the letter writer must have confused this with the great influence that Charles certainly had for I do not believe there is any tablet. We must have known of it if one had been put up. I was at Domum this week and had a glimpse of Edmund but not of Geoffrey.2 I think I never came across so few people that I knew partly because it was crowded, and partly because it was dark. But two of the married Moberly daughters were there and I walked about with them, and felt like old times, though one of them (Kitty Barter) had a tall handsome daughter of eighteen with her. I am glad Frances is so much better I hope all her troubles will be over while the warm weather lasts, but she will have to take care in the winter – I think Doctors always dislike one going to Church. Gertrude is on the whole better, she has been spending a week in my room instead of her own while there was a chimney sweeping and cleaning – her first change for ten months! Today she is gone back again. That unfortunate Mrs F Yonge has been applying to Colonel Oldfield who wrote to John Eyre Yonge about her. 3 She seems to be in a hopeless state of illness by his account (John’s) but he fancies it is a first application. One son is in the post office, getting 10s a week. Fancy Morgan [?] having a brother with such young children! Mr Coward (our locum tenens) is very young 27 & looking younger. He has a splendid voice – On St James’s day, at evening service when we don’t have the choir or any singing, he gave out a hymn, and while we were gazing in amazement sang it all right through by himself!
your most affectionate cousin
C M Yonge