Letter from William Bodham Donne, Bury St. Edmunds, to Frederick Walpole Keppel, 1852 December 29 : autograph manuscript signed.

Concerning a paper (on the subject of the Corn laws), which he says he will return to Keppel and which he refers to as a "protectionist curiosity" laying out a scheme "so complicated that it would require agricultural Solomons to comprehend it."; expressing his wish that something could be done to alleviate the "fears & distresses" of the farmers, and stating that he would give them a 5/- duty for awhile, if only to "vex [Richard] Cobden, whose bigotry disgusts me", adding "I have just licensed with much satisfaction a pantomime in which, under the name of Mr. No-Taxes, he is represented as a trade agitator. The damage which he, Bright and Milner Gibson inflict upon the cause of rational reform is incalculable."; describing a speech he recently delivered at Colchester on Alfred the Great, noting the his views on Alfred are "substantially those of Mr. Hallam and Mr. Allen, staunch Whigs, and of Mr. Kemble, who is something more", but that his audience "not hearing the church abused, and hearing a king extolled, instantly fell into a conservative trance, and dreamed that I had preached to them against cotton spinners & radicals", with the result that he was addressed in the Ipswich journal as "a pillar of the state and a Buttress of the Church", and the residents of Essex represented in the Globe as "comforting themselves under agricultural pressure with Bucolic poetry, and as rejoicing in the doctrine of Mr. Bodham Donne", expressing his fear that [John?] Gurdon Rebow will spread the news far and wide, and asking that Keppel contradict any rumors he may, assuring him that "I am as sound a liberal as walks only 'I fell among thieves,' and was accordingly 'wounded & stripped'-of my good name"; telling Keppel that he recently stopped a play from being acted and that the manager has retaliated by posting "my interdict" and his name in letters "half a foot high" in the regions of White Chapel and Aldgate.