My dear Darwin,

Many thanks for your letter & the cheque for £5 from your father which reached me here today.² I wrote to Madame Michelet on receiving your former letter to tell her of M^r Darwin’s intention to join in the subscription & I am sure it will give her & her friends the greatest pleasure.³ There was no one in England, or perhaps in Europe, for whom Jules Michelet had such reverence.⁴ This feeling of his was so strong that I believe it principally converted Michelet at the close of his life from the unreasonable anti-English tone of his early days. And he used to speak of England as “le pays de Charles Darwin”

We are staying here now (at my fathers) until August.⁵ It is a lovely country, & this is a very fine old house of 1529 in red brick & terracotta. I have established myself & am working in a room which is a perfect student’s dream. It is a long gallery 90 feet long with mullioned windows, bays &c, lined with old oak pannelling & hung with faded tapestries   It is in a disused wing of the house, & was formerly the chapel. It is like a long gallery in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I have my table & my books in one of the overhanging bays, & through the lattices on the other side, I get exquisite views over the Dorking hills, the scent of the new mown hay, & the singing of the birds. It is hard to imagine oneself in the XIX^th Century   This gallery has hardly been touched for 3 centuries & there is nothing in it but the old wood carving, tapestries, & some old wooden chests & carved chairs of the time. The only modern thing is some books of science which I have brought up here to work at.

The terrific account of burglars here which the newspapers published on Monday is almost pure invention— there was no fight, no masks, no jewels, no one seen & nothing taken but the sugar tongs.⁶ Two men did get in, but they spent their efforts in trying to force the old mediæval chests & an iron safe of the period which they could not open, & in which there was nothing.

Yours very sincerely | Frederic Harrison.