nd such processes as those which
have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and "Kirton" into
"Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon rarer: but have
also made such a _locus classicus_ of the habit as this all
the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in
one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this
peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the
aptitude of the younger in her "_mother_-tongue." Southey
has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend
Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but
the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr.
Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of
Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of
Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature,
sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara
Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth--the three
daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father
says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was
little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with
surprise of some German lady as "smaller than you are").

30. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:

KESWICK, Sep. 14, 1821

Dear Stumparumper,

Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The
purport of this letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes
in Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of
the language spoken in this house by ... and invented by her. I have
carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and
mine, having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in
full confabulumpatus.

31. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:

KESWICK, Oct. 7, 1821.

My dear G,

I very much approve your laudable curiosity to know the precise meaning
of that noble word _horsemangandering_. Before I tell you its
application, you must be informed of its history and origin. Be it
therefore known unto you that ... the whole and sole inventor of the
never-to-be-forgotten _lingo grande_ (in which, by the bye, I purpose
ere long to compose a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my
daughter a great _horsemangander_, thinking, I suppose, that that
appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning as could be put into
any decent compound. From this substantive the verb has been