File:Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries- Volume 7, page 76, May 28-30, 1855.jpg

Transcription:

more.

29. Tuesday. William Bolton off to-day. I don't like him; his shrewdness is vilely alloyed with selfishness. He thinks not at all of Mary Bennett, as a wife, and for her sake I'm glad of it, (as she is so kindly, and simple, she'd accept him.) Comments are made of her visits to Neithrop, and William told, how in a Chacombe tavern he'd heard himself alluded to as "the man whom Mary Bennett courts." Mentioning the thing was of course brutal taste, but he hasn't a grain of a gentleman in his composition. Sarah Ann [Bolton], Davids, his wife, and other-Banburians, were in town yesterday, by rail-excursion, but we saw none of them. / Caroline Hogarth at our house, to day. / I, writing, to Hannah [Bennett], midst other matters. This same correspondence is one of the truest and purest pleasures I now profess. Not that it is very brilliant, or affords great scope for intellectual display, but that is assures me I have the sympathy of a kind, frank woman's heart. Love, like religion, is more a matter of the affections than the intellect, and sage and simpleton can alike meet on the common ground of needing sympathy and kindness. How coldly would our Lord's most divine teaching have appeared in the form of dry aphorisms, and dogmas and moralities, divorced from the unworldly life, and touching parables of

"— The first true Gentleman that ever wore

Earth about him!"

30. Wednesday. Calling at King's Arms Yard, learnt that Harry Price is in the country. To George Clarke's, finding him and another at work on big Cemetery Plans for competition.