Here, on his own land, surrounded by his family, Marryat spent what were, doubtless, not the least happy years of his life. An occasional friend from London found the ex-_viveur_ and dandy in velveteen shooting jacket and coloured trousers, turning out at five in the morning, trotting about his farm on Dumpling, attentive to scientific farming, and invincible in hope of profit from that deceptive venture. For company, he had his romps with his children, his game of piquet, and an occasional, or even frequent, visit from Lieutenant Thomas, of the coastguard station at Morston. The two old seamen met, and talked of the rapid progress of the service to the d----, as old seamen have done from the beginning, and will do to the end of time. From the outer world came requests for work from editors, suggestions that he should take up this subject or the other, and at times invitations to come up and take part in farewell dinners to Macready or to Dickens. These last he steadily declined. Except during a few brief visits to London on matters of business, he remained fixed at Langham till the disease which proved fatal drove him up to town in search of better medical help than he could obtain in Norfolk.
He has himself described the work of these last years in a letter to Forster, who had written in 1845 to Marryat, suggesting that he should give “a month or two to a short biography, of about a volume; something of the size and manner of Southey’s ‘Nelson,’ and the subject ‘Collingwood.’” Marryat thought it over, but declined, giving, among other reasons, this: “That I have lately taken to a different style of writing, that is, for young people. My former productions, like all novels, have had their day, and for the present, at least, will sell no more; but it is not so with the _juveniles_; they have an annual demand, and become _a little income_ to me; which I infinitely prefer to receiving any sum in a mass, which very soon disappears somehow or other.” Marryat justified his unwillingness to write the life of Collingwood by other than business reasons. “I should like,” he told Forster, “to write about Collingwood, but if I were to write it in anything like a stipulated time I should not do it well. Biography is most difficult writing, and requires more time and thought than any original composition, and if I take it up I must be free as air.” In addition to this (justly high) estimate of the difficulty and dignity of biography, Marryat, with sound critical judgment, decided that Collingwood was not a proper subject. There is not enough known or to be known about him. So much of his work was done as a subordinate under St. Vincent or Nelson. With them he was always in the second place at best, and when he reached great independent command, the heroic days of the naval war were over, and there was little for him to do beyond duties of a mainly routine character, performed in the midst of chronic illness. It is a pity perhaps that Marryat did not devote some part of his work to naval biography, but he would hardly have made a real success with Collingwood. For Forster himself, Marryat wrote a series of letters to the _Examiner_ on the “Condition of England Question,” or that part of England which he saw about him in Norfolk. “I have,” he wrote to Forster, “been amusing myself with putting together my thoughts and knowledge of the condition of the agricultural class--I mean the common labourer principally--and I believe I know more of the subject than anything I have seen in print. What I can say is from personal knowledge. I was thinking of writing some letters to Peel as a Norfolk farmer, ‘The Poor Man _versus_ Sir Robert Peel.’ It would not do to put my name to them as they would be anything but Conservative, but they would be the _truth_.” It was not Marryat’s destiny to be a politician, and his opinion of Sir Robert Peel is perhaps not very valuable. His own political activity was not particularly consistent, for he appears to have swayed from Reformer to Conservative, and back again, but it may be noted that he ended by sharing that dislike of the leader who always led his followers to surrender which was so widely felt in Peel’s last days.