TO LEWIS CAMPBELL, Esq.

                                                                       Trin. Coll., 17th October 1855.

I expect to be grinding this term. There are lectures on hydrostatics and optics, papers for questionists to be set  and read over with the men, which is procrastinatious. Besides this I may have to lecture the working men, and   what spare time I have I intend to use on various subjects, which will keep me in work for some time to come, so  I do not require any pupils to keep my hand in this term. I was looking for Jowett's book in the library, but, as   usual, all the new theology had been carried off in a lump by the M.A.'s, who get in the first day. I wanted Ellicott,   but he was out too, so I took Carlyle on the French Revolution. I have been reading the English language,   comprising Chaucer, Sir Tristram, Bacon F., Pope, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns' letters, Isaac Taylor's  Saturday Night, Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice, and combining the whole with Trench on English Past and  Present, and with all this I derive pleasure and information, but not a single glimmer of a theory about Words.  And yet I have presently to state whether words mould thought or thought brews words. Is not one theory as  good as another? Faith and a dale better too, if it was not for the sake of laying them together by the ears, which is   a difficult task when you have to catch both yourself.

I was staying at the Blackburns' when I was at Glasgow, but they were away, and the Ramsays fed and tended   me. I found your photograph there, together with a few other pleasant recollections. I have been over to H. M.  Butler, who is come up again. We were talking about Maurice, etc. Maurice is a man I am loath to say nay to, or   to accuse of wilful perversion of facts; but in some matters I think he is in great error, especially in his estimate of   respectable ordinary Christians, as far as regards their creed. He cannot go too far in enforcing practice and work   on people who were bound to it before, and theoretically confess it, but he is too hard upon the theories, and   totally misrepresents them. I would rather be taken for a Yezide than for one of Maurice's popular   religionists.