Rottingdean <1>
December 3d 1809
My Dear Mamma,
Pray write to me or else I shall think that some accident has happened to you. It wants 2 weeks and 2 days only to the holidays. I am doing “Quatuor mundi ætates” <2> in Ovids Metamorphoses and we are doing “Cæsar de bello Gallico.” <3> I begin to wish a great deal for the holidays for it has been a very long halfyear indeed to me. We learned the wrong collect last Sunday so we had none to do this morning nor any to translate into Latin as we usually do. The boys (that is to say Charles Manning and George Smith) have excessively pretty plays, yesterday they performed Ali Baba or the forty thieves, for the first time. I wish you would buy me “Peter Wilkins” but do’nt <sic> send it to school, keep it for me. I have never missed being “Very, Very Good” in the Abbè <sic> Mouchel’s report although every other boy has missed it (sometimes). I have very little to say else because you do not write to me, so I have no questions to answer unfortunately. Frederick Manning has nets to catch Goldfinches in. There are thirteen cages of all sorts in the school at present.
Your Affectionate son,
William. Henry. Fox. Talbot.
Lady Elisabeth Feilding
Melbury
Sherborne
Dorset –
Notes:
1. Rottingdean, East Sussex, 4 mi SE of Brighton: WHFT attended school there from 1808–1811.
2. The Four Ages of the World.
3. Caesaar: On the Gallic War.