ourse
Hazlitt, and the "lectures" are his famous ones on English
Poets. As for Lamb's criticisms on lectures generally, they
would perhaps be endorsed by some who have given, as well as
by many who have received, this form of instruction. The
"gentleman at Haydon's" was the hero or victim of a story
good, but too long to give here. He said some excessively
foolish things and Lamb, after dinner, behaved to him in a
fashion possibly not quite undeserved but entirely
unsanctioned by the conventions of society.

34. TO MRS. WORDSWORTH

East India House.
February 18, 1818.

My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,

I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in
the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready
to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home
is, that I am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a
moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.
I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his
unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I
could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with
sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other, and
yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling thoughts all my
own,"--faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent
friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny
Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the
same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean),
or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while
my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of
veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the
chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay
science--who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions