away the harpy solitude from me. I like
'em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I
mean merely to give you an idea between
office confinement and after-office society,
how little time I can call my own. I mean
only to draw a picture not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have
it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could
exchange some of my faces and voices for
the faces and voices which a late visitation
brought most welcome, and carried away,
leaving regret but more pleasure, even a
kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured
with that kind northern visitation. My
London faces and noises don't hear me—I
mean no disrespect, or I should explain
myself, that instead of their return 220 times
a year, and the return of W. W., &c., seven
times in 104 weeks, some more equal distri-
bution might be found. I have scarce room
to put in Mary's kind love, and my poor
name,
C. LAMB."

I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices, all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week, would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I "S. T. C. is lecturing with success. I mean take them to be chorus singers of the two to hear some of the course, but lectures are theatres (it must be both of them), begin their not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I con- may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and ceive) who, being limited by their talents to you can't think why you are brought togethe burthen of the song at the play-houses, ther to hear a man read his works, which in revenge have got the common popular you could read so much better at leisure airs by Bishop, or some cheap composer, yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in pain, lest the gift of utterance should sudin chorus. At least I never can catch any denly fail the orator in the middle, as it did of the text of the plain song, nothing but the me at the dinner given in honour of me at Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, "That fury being quenched'-the howl I mean and there I stopped; the rest my feelings -a burden succeeds of shouts and clapping, were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs. and knocking of the table. At length over- Wordsworth will go on, kindly haunting us tasked nature drops under it, and escapes with visions of seeing the lakes once more, for a few hours into the society of the sweet which never can be realised. Between us silent creatures of dreams, which go away there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as then I think of the words Christabel's father there seemed to be between me and that used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong gentleman concerned in the stamp-office, ink) to say every morning by way of variety that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's.

when he awoke:

Every knell, the Baron saith,

Wakes us up to a world of death'

or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive

I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all such peopleaccountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us

of all our red-letter days, they had done promise pressed hard upon him, and he protheir worst, but I was deceived in the length cured the requisite quantity of verse from to which heads of offices, those true libertyhaters, can go. They are the tyrants, not Ferdinand, nor Nero-by a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear W. W. be thankful for liberty."

if then will be convenient. Can we secure a he would have call'd for the bull for a relief. coach home?

"Believe me ever yours,

"C. LAMB."

"I have but one holiday, which is Christmas-day itself nakedly: no pretty garnish and fringes of St. John's-day, Holy Innocents, &c., that used to bestud it all around in the calendar. Improbe labor! I write six hours every day in this candle-light fogden at Leadenhall."

Neither could Lycidas, or the Chorics (how do you like the word ?) of Samson Agonistes, have been written with two inks. Your couplets with points, epilogues to Mr. H.'s, &c., might be even benefited by the twyfount, where one line (the second) is for point, and the first for rhyme. I think the alternation would assist, like a mould. I maintain it, you could not have written your stanzas on pre-existence with two inks. Try another; and Rogers, with his silver standish, having one ink only, I will bet my 'Ode on In the next year [1819] Lamb was greatly Tobacco,' against the 'Pleasures of Memory,' pleased by the dedication to him of Words--and 'Hope,' too, shall put more fervour of worth's poem of "The Waggoner," which enthusiasm into the same subject than you Wordsworth had read to him in MS. thirteen can with your two; he shall do it stans pede years before. On receipt of the little volume, in uno, as it were. Lamb acknowledged it as follows :—

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"June 7th, 1819.

"My dear Wordsworth,-You cannot imagine how proud we are here of the dedication. We read it twice for once that we do the poem. I mean all through; yet Benjamin' is no common favourite; there is a spirit of beautiful tolerance in it; it is as good as it was in 1806; and it will be as good in 1829, if our dim eyes shall be awake to peruse it. Methinks there is a kind of shadowing affinity between the subject of the narrative and the subject of the dedication;-but I will not enter into personal themes, else, substituting

for Ben, and the Honourable United Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies, for the master of the misused team, it might seem, by no far-fetched analogy, to point its dim warnings hitherward; but I reject the omen, especially as its import seems to have been diverted to another victim.

"I will never write another letter with alternate inks. You cannot imagine how it cramps the flow of the style. I can conceive, Pindar (I do not mean to compare myself to him), by the command of Hiero, the Sicilian tyrant (was not he the tyrant of some place? fie on my neglect of history); I can conceive him by command of Hiero or Perillus set down to pen an Isthmian or Nemean panegyric in lines, alternate red and black. I maintain he couldn't have done it; it would have been a strait-laced torture to his muse;

"The 'Waggoner' is very ill put up in boards, at least it seems to me always to open at the dedication; but that is a mechanical fault. I re-read the 'White Doe of Rylstone;' the title should be always written at length, as Mary Sabilla N- a very nice woman of our acquaintance, always signs hers at the bottom of the shortest note. Mary told her, if her name had been Mary Ann, she would have signed M. A. N————, or M. only, dropping the A.; which makes me think, with some other trifles, that she understands something of human nature. My pen goes galloping on most rhapsodically, glad to have escaped the bondage of two inks.

"Manning has just sent it home, and it came as fresh to me as the immortal creature it speaks of. M. sent it home with a note, having this passage in it: 'I cannot help writing to you while I am reading Wordsworth's poem. I am got into the third canto, and say that it raises my opinion of him very much indeed.* 'Tis broad, noble, poetical, with a masterly scanning of human actions, absolutely above common readers. What a manly (implied) interpretation of (bad) partyactions, as trampling the Bible, &c.,' and so he goes on.

"I do not know which I like best,—the prologue (the latter part especially) to P. Bell, or the epilogue to Benjamin. Yes, I tell stories; I do know I like the last best;

fourteen years behind in his knowledge of who has or has not written good verse of late."

"N.B.-M., from his peregrinations, is twelve or

and the 'Waggoner' altogether is a pleasanter from bed. He came staggering under his remembrance to me than the 'Itinerant.' If double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at it were not, the page before the first page would and ought to make it so.

"If, as you say, the 'Waggoner,' in some sort, came at my call, oh for a potent voice to call forth the 'Recluse' from his profound dormitory, where he sleeps forgetful of his foolish charge-the world.

"Had I three inks, I would invoke him! Talfourd has written a most kind review of J. Woodvil, &c., in the 'Champion.' He is your most zealous admirer, in solitude and in crowds. H. Crabb Robinson gives me any dear prints that I happen to admire, and I love him for it and for other things. Alsager shall have his copy, but at present I have lent it for a day only, not choosing to part with my own. Mary's love. How do you all do, amanuenses both-marital and sororal ? C. LAMB."

The next letter which remains is addressed to Manning (returned to England, and domiciled in Hertfordshire), in the spring of 1819.

TO MR. MANNING.

"My dear M.,—I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard lately. I want to know about you. I wish you were nearer. How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathamstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman.

'Hail, Mackery End'

once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterwards that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his nonsensorium. But has laughed his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of 600l. per annum to onesixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropt not on him from heaven. It just came across me that I was writing to Canton. Will you drop in to-morrow night? Fanny Kelly is coming, if she does not cheat us. Mrs. Gold is well, but proves 'uncoined,' as the lovers about Wheathamstead would say.

I

"I have not had such a quiet half hour to sit down to a quiet letter for many years. have not been interrupted above four times. I wrote a letter the other day, in alternate lines, black ink and red, and you cannot think how it chilled the flow of ideas. Next This is a fragment of a blank verse poem Monday is Whit-Monday. What a reflection! which I once meditated, but got no further.* Twelve years ago, and I should have kept The E. I. H. has been thrown into a quan- that and the following holiday in the fields dary by the strange phenomenon of poor a Maying. All of those pretty pastoral whom I have known man and delights are over. This dead, everlasting mad-man twenty-seven years, he being elder dead desk,-how it weighs the spirit of a here than myself by nine years and more. gentleman down! This dead wood of the He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-desk, instead of your living trees! But then headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, again, I hate the Joskins, a name for Hertinoffensive chap; a little too fond of the fordshire bumpkins. Each state of life has creature; who isn't at times? but had its inconvenience; but then again, mine has not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit more than one. Not that I repine, or by ten o'clock next morning, and unfortu- grudge, or murmur at my destiny. I have nately, in he wandered the other morning meat and drink, and decent apparel; I shall, drunk with last night, and with a super- at least, when I get a new hat. fœtation of drink taken in since he set out

See "Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,"-Essays of Elia, p. 100,-for a charming account of a visit to their cousin in the country with Mr. Barron Field.

"A red-haired man just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my thoughts. I haven't a word to add. I don't know why I send this letter, but I have had a hankering