eing a writer in a magazine! The dinner costly, served on
massy plate, champagne, pines, &c.; forty-seven present, among whom the
Chairman and two other directors of the India Company. There's for you!
and got away pretty sober! Quite saved my credit!

We continue to like our house prodigiously. Does Mary Hazlitt go on with
her novel, or has she begun another? I would not discourage her, tho' we
continue to think it (so far) in its present state not saleable.

Our kind remembrances to her and hers and you and yours.--

Yours truly, C. LAMB.

I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate.

[Addressed to "Mrs. Hazlitt, Alphington, near Exeter." This letter is
the first draft of the _Elia_ essay "Amicus Redivivus," which was
printed in the _London Magazine_ in December, 1823. George Dyer, who was
then sixty-eight, had been getting blind steadily for some years. A
visit to Lamb's cottage to-day, bearing in mind that the ribbon of green
between iron railings that extends along Colebrooke Row was at that time
an open stream, will make the nature of G.D.'s misadventure quite
plain.

"Mary Hazlitt"-the daughter of John Hazlitt, the essayist's brother.

"I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate." Hazlitt wrote,
in the essay "On the Pleasures of Hating," "I think I must be friends
with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to
Southey, and told him a piece of his mind!" Coleridge also approved of
it, and Crabb Robinson's praise was excessive.

Here should come a note from Lamb to Mrs. Shelley dated Nov. 12, 1823,
saying that Dyer walked into the New River on Sunday week at one o'clock
with his eyes open.]

LETTER 335

CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

E.I.H., 21st November, 1823.

DEAR Southey,-The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which
was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed
"Quarterly Review" had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own
knowledge, that the "Confessions of a Drunkard" was a genuine
description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill
meant, may produce much ill. _That_ might have injured me alive and
dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared
for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of
repetition directed against me. I wished both magazine and review at the
bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to se