of
criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc,--what Coleridge
said at the lecture last night--who have the form of reading men, but,
for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as
well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of
an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they
should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its
intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary
warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper,
cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which
had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one
of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a
moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in
comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon, or my
brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating
alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come,
and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange;
for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not
wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity,
acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God bless 'em! I
love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion
to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and
deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go
before bed-time. Come never, I would say to those 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.
and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve m