The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 64

n.o.body will be the more justified for your endurance. You won't save the soul of a mouse. 'Tis a pure selfish pleasure.

You never was rack'd, was you? I should like an authentic map of those feelings.

You seem to have the flying gout.

You can scarcely scrue a smile out of your face--can you? I sit at immunity, and sneer _ad libitum._

'Tis now the time for you to make good resolutions. I may go on breaking 'em, for any thing the worse I find myself.

Your Doctor seems to keep you on the long cure. Precipitate healings are never good.

Don't come while you are so bad. I shan't be able to attend to your throes and the dumbee at once.

I should like to know how slowly the pain goes off. But don't write, unless the motion will be likely to make your sensibility more exquisite.

Your affectionate and truly healthy friend C. LAMB.

Mary thought a Letter from me might amuse you in your torment--

[Robinson was the victim of a sudden attack of acute rheumatism. He had a course of Turkish baths at Brighton to cure him.]

LETTER 484

CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER

Enfield, April 29, 1829.

Dear Dyer--As well as a bad pen can do it, I must thank you for your friendly attention to the wishes of our young friend Emma, who was packing up for Bury when your sonnet arrived, and was too hurried to express her sense of its merits. I know she will treasure up that and your second communication among her choicest rarities, as from her _grandfather's_ friend, whom not having seen, she loves to hear talked of. The second letter shall be sent after her, with our first parcel to Suffolk, where she is, to us, alas dead and Bury'd; we solely miss her.

Should you at any hour think of four or six lines, to send her, addressed to herself simply, naming her grandsire, and to wish she may pa.s.s through life as much respected, with your own G. Dyer at the end, she would feel rich indeed, for the nature of an Alb.u.m asks for verses that have not been in print before; but this quite at your convenience: and to be less trouble to yourself, four lines would be sufficient.

Enfield has come out in summer beauty. Come when you will and we will give you a bed. Emma has left hers, you know. I remain, my dear Dyer, your affectionate friend,

CHARLES LAMB.

[From _The Mirror_, 1841. Lamb made the same pun--Bury'd--to George Dyer in his letter of December 5, 1808. His Alb.u.m verses for Miss Isola I have not seen.]

LETTER 485

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD

[No date. ? May, 1829.]

Dear Hood,--We will look out for you on Wednesday, be sure, tho' we have not eyes like Emma, who, when I made her sit with her back to the window to keep her to her Latin, literally saw round backwards every one that past, and, O, [that] she were here to jump up and shriek out "There are the Hoods!" We have had two pretty letters from her, which I long to show you--together with Enfield in her May beauty.

Loves to Jane.

[_Here follow rough caricatures of Charles and his sister, and_] "I can't draw no better."

[I have dated this letter May, 1829, because Miss Isola had just gone to Fornham, in Suffolk, whence presumably the two letters had come.]

LETTER 486

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[No date.]

Calamy is _good reading_. Mary is always thankful for Books in her way.

I won't trouble you for any in _my way_ yet, having enough to read.

Young Hazlitt lives, at least his father does, at _3_ or _36_ [36 I have it down, with the _6_ scratch'd out] Bouverie Street, Fleet Street. If not to be found, his mother's address is, Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs.

Tomlinson's, Potters Bar. At one or other he must be heard of. We shall expect you with the full moon. Meantime, our thanks.

C.L.

We go on very quietly &c.

["Calamy" would be Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), the historian of Nonconformity.

Mr. W.C. Hazlitt in his _Memoir of Hazlitt_ says that his grandfather moved in 1829 to 3 Bouverie Street, and in the beginning of 1830 to 6 Frith Street, Soho. Young Hazlitt was William junior, afterwards Mr.

Registrar Hazlitt and then seventeen years of age.]

LETTER 487

CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON

May 28, 1829.

Dear W.,--Introduce this, or omit it, as you like. I think I wrote better about it in a letter to you from India H. If you have that, perhaps out of the two I could patch up a better thing, if you'd return both. But I am very poorly, and have been hara.s.sed with an illness of my sister's.

The Ode was printed in the "New Times" nearly the end of 1825, and I have only omitted some silly lines. Call it a corrected copy.

Yours ever, C. LAMB.

Put my name to either or both, as you like.

[This letter contains Lamb's remarks on the Secondary Novels of Defoe, printed in Wilson's _Life and Times of De Foe_, Chapter XVII. of Vol.

III., and also his "Ode to the Treadmill," which Wilson omitted from that work. See Vols. I. and IV. of the present edition for both pieces.]