weight in it that forces me to give it up. Pray forgive me and write to the Printer where you would have it sent in future. Yours truly, C. LAMB. I have return'd the Printer all the copy of the first sheets. Dear Miss Betham,-All this while I have been tormenting myself with the thought of having been ungracious to you, and you have been all the while accusing yourself. Let us absolve one another, and be quiet. My head is in such a state from incapacity for business, that I certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. No one can tell how ill I am, because it does not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull deep and invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black jaundiced skin-over, and that all was as well within as my cursed looks. You must not think me worse than I am. I am determined not to be overset, but to give up business rather, and get 'em to allow me a trifle for services past. Oh, that I had been a shoemaker or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune. Oh, darling laziness! heaven of Epicurus! Saint's Everlasting Rest! that I could drink vast potations of thee thro' unmeasured Eternity -Otium cum vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of repose. I stand not upon the dignified sort. Accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce, business. Inventions of that old original busybody, Satan-Sabbathless, restless Satan. A curse relieves; do you ever try it? A strange letter to write to a lady, but more honeyed sentences will not distil. I dare not ask who revises in my stead. I have drawn you into a scrape and am ashamed, but I know no remedy. My unwellness must be my apology. God bless you (tho' He curse the India House, and fire it to the ground), and may no unkind error creep into "Marie." May all its readers like it as well as I do, and everybody about you like its kind author no worse! Why the devil am I never to have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts, verse or prose, again? Why must I write of tea and drugs, and price goods and bales of indigo? Farewell. C. LAMB. Mary goes to her place on Sunday, I mean your maid, foolish Mary; she wants a very little brains only to be an excellent servant; she is excellently calculated for the country, where nobody has brains. CLXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM AYRTON Oct. 1815. Dear Ayrton, I am confident that the word air in your sense does not occur in Spenser or Shakspeare, much less in older writers. The first trace I remember of it is in Milton's sonnet to Lawrence, "Warble immortal verse and Tuscan air;" where, if the word had not been very newly familiarized, he would doubtless have used airs in the plural. Yours in haste, CLXXXIX. TO THE SAME C. L. Oct. 14, 1815. Dear A. Concerning "Air"-Shakspeare Twelfth night has "light airs & giddy recollections" I am sure I forget whereabouts-Also you will see another use of it in the Tempest (same sense) in Johnson's Dictionary. Spenser I still persist in, has it not, much less Chaucer. I have turned to all their places about music. C. L. No doubt we had it from the Italian Aria-now Aria is not the latin Æra modernized, but Aer, is it not? XI. 2 A CXC. TO MISS HUTCHINSON Thursday, 19th Oct. 1815. Dear Miss H.,-I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favourable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness, but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. I don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had had no partial separations. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks;-" the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs." Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla ! I feel I hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me, and involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfortunes. But I feel all I can—all the kindness I can, towards I hear nothing from Coleridge. Yours truly, all-God bless you! C. LAMB. you |