From Richard Twopeny   16 November 1825

My dear Henslow,

[Do not open the enclosure]

It is with the utmost horror & amazement that I look back to the interval elapsed since between the last letter that you wrote to me, & this my acknowledgement of it. I have only to observe that the loss has been mine & not yours, as a letter to a person in the midst of his family & friends is at the most but a passing amusement, whilst to one who is at a distance from both it is not a luxury but a necessary of life. I hope therefore that you will consider me to be sufficiently punished by my own negligence, & let me have the pleasure of hearing from you again very soon. I am at present at Milan on my way to home, where I intend to pass another winter, & shall leave it very early in the spring partly to avoid the bore of the holy week, & partly because I should like to pass a few months in Paris before I leave the continent. My projected tour into Greece was completely put a stop to by the state of Elwes’ health, the gout first taking possession of him, then a liver complaint, & lastly the gravel. I do not know whether Pandora’s box is yet emptied, or whether any other evil yet await him; but I have taken advantage of the intervals between the show to visit Istria, with which I was much pleased, I do not know whether any of the ruins of antiquity in Italy are better preserved or more striking than those of Pola. I employed myself whilst there in taking sketches of them & do not feel myself over & above well satisfied with my performances, but they will serve as remembrances to myself, though not very well calculated to please anyone else. I met with Sheepshanks at Venice, who informed one that you had succeeded Martin, which I was very glad to hear, he also informed me of Whewells seating himself in your vacant chair, & it gave me great pleasure to hear that you had so distinguished a successor. He was not able to inform me of the state of your family, but as I have no doubt that a young professor has already seen the light long since.

I beg you will present my compts to him, & tell him that I hope before too long to have the pleasure of being presented to him, The whole Italian world is at present mad in making excavations, I had a letter the other day from Rome informing me that a lady there took a fancy to dig to her court yard in search of hidden treasure, in doing which amongst other relics they discovered a figure of which only the head was discernable, the rest of the body being encrusted with earth and mortar, this was taken carefully into the drawing room & a large party invited to observe the process of delivering it from its shroud & deciding upon its merits, when the operation was performed & the statue held up to view, it turned out (to the confusion of the discoverer & her fair female friends who were present in great number) to be a priapus of the first magnitude. He is I understand to be retrenched to those particulars which render him unfit for polite society, & being rebaptized, is to become the great ornament of the house in which he was found. I have been able to botanize very little this summer, the heat [at] Sorrento being such that we could do nothing all day but eat snow [&] gasp for breath. Made a small collection in Sicily but the insects have walked off with the whole all owing to a stupid druggist at Palermo who would not sell poison to my servant without an order from a physician, which I had not time to procure, or to visit his shop myself. I have just seen in the list of arrivals Sig S.P. Beales & family con loro seguito, this can be no other than our renowned friend of Newnham, pray what has caused him to emigrate?

I hope than when you write to me will send me a whole bucket full of Cambridge news, of which I stand in great wait. I have not seen an english paper for the last two months. Pray are our new buildings yet begun on terra firma, or are they still only castles in the air. I am improving myself in Italian by a long correspondence with the custom house officers of Palermo; when I was in Sicily I happened to be passing by a garden in which a countryman whilst digging hit upon an ancient tomb, from which by our joint efforts we extracted painted vases enough enough to fill a small barrel, & for three dollars I made myself possessor of them. I hired a mule from Agrigentum where they were found to take them to Palermo, & when they arrived there the customhouse refused to let them leave the kingdom; the loss would not cut me greatly to heart, but I am doing what I can to recover them. I believe that one of them being formed or rather misformed in the shape of a grotesque head, is the cause of the impediment. I suppose it is considered to be a likeness of the king, it is quite ill looking enough. [rest of page removed].

R. Twopeny