t
like you enough to give you anything so good.

I have dined with T. Moore and breakfasted with Rogers, since I saw you;
have much to say about them when we meet, which I trust will be in a
week or two. I have been over-watched and over-poeted since Wordsworth
has been in town. I was obliged for health sake to wish him gone: but
now he is gone I feel a great loss. I am going to Dalston to recruit,
and have serious thoughts--of altering my condition, that is, of taking
to sobriety. What do you advise me?

T. Moore asked me your address in a manner which made me believe he
meant to call upon you.

Rogers spake very kindly of you, as every body does, and none with so
much reason as your

C.L.

[This is the first important letter to Bryan Waller Procter, better
known as Barry Cornwall, who was afterwards to write, in his old age, so
pleasant a memoir of Lamb. He was then thirty-five, was practising law,
and had already published _Marcian Colonna_ and _A Sicilian Story_.

The Epistle to Mr. Jervas (with Mr. Dryden's translation of Fresnoy's
_Art of Painting_) did not end upon this line, but some eighteen lines
later. I give the portrait in my large edition.

"Lady Mary." By Lady Mary Lamb means, as Pope did in the first edition,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But after his quarrel with that lady Pope
altered it to Worsley, signifying Lady Frances Worsley, daughter of the
Duke of Marlborough and wife of Sir Robert Worsley.]

LETTER 316

CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON

[P.M. April 25, 1823.]

Dear Miss H----, Mary has such an invincible reluctance to any
epistolary exertion, that I am sparing her a mortification by taking the
pen from her. The plain truth is, she writes such a pimping, mean,
detestable hand, that she is ashamed of the formation of her letters.
There is an essential poverty and abjectness in the frame of them. They
look like begging letters. And then she is sure to omit a most
substantial word in the second draught (for she never ventures an
epistle, without a foul copy first) which is obliged to be interlined,
which spoils the neatest epistle, you know [_the word "epistle" is
underlined_). Her figures, 1, 2, 3, 4, &c., where she has occasion to
express numerals, as in the date (25 Apr 1823), are not figures, but
Figurantes. And the combined posse go staggering up and down shameless
as drunkards in the day time. It is no better when she rules her paper,
her lines are "not less erring" than h