C. LAMB.

* * * * *

W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making copious use of
quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is
lecturing with success. I have not heard either of him or H., but dined
with S. T. C. at Gillman's a Sunday or two since, and he was well and in
good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course but lectures are not
much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If _read_, they are
dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a
man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure
yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in pain lest the gift of
utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at
the dinner given in honour of me at the London tavern.[117] "Gentlemen,"
said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the
necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us
with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised.
Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies
and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that
gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled
from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an
office. I hate all such people--accountants' deputy-accountants. The
dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is
unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by
the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet
what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all
our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in
the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go.
They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this
week they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going
at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us.
Dear W. W., be thankful for liberty.

FOOTNOTES:

[117] Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph which,
stating that an inquest had been held on some one who, after lecturing
somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded thus: "Verdict: death
from natural causes."

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

It is one of the commonest of commonplaces that there are
certain subjects and persons who and which