.--I suppose. It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling.
Cannot we think of Burns, or Thompson, without sullying the thought with
a reflection out of place upon Lord Rochester? These verses might have
been inscribed upon a tomb; are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look
pretty upon a tombstone. Besides, there is a quotation in it, always bad
in verse; seldom advisable in prose.

I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from
insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall
try them. Omitting that stanza, a _very little_ alteration is want'g in
the beginn'g of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily (I flatter
not!) you have bro't in his subjects; and, (_I suppose_) his favorite
measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the
Farmer's Boy. He dined with me once, and his manners took me
exceedingly.

I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my
own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My
garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny
sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and
twice a garden in London.

Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by
circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means
the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean
associations, Hawking and sp-----g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is
every thing, in such dulcet modulations 'specially. I like

Gilbert Meldrum's sterner tones,

without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as
if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally.
There's a vile phrase.

Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets--[to] have 'em ready with
Southey's Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London,
which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.

Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100
callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read
or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will
return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho' entirely yours
C.L.

[Barton's "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet" (who
died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils,
1824. This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:--

It is not quaint and l