ld Margate Hoy" Lamb, in speaking of Hastings,
had made the same objection.

In a letter to his sister, written from Hastings at this time, Hood
says:--

This is the last of our excursions. We have tried, but in vain, to
find out the baker and his wife recommended to us by Lamb as the
very lions of green Hastings. There is no such street as he has
named throughout the town, and the ovens are singularly numerous. We
have given up the search, therefore, but we have discovered the
little church in the wood, and it is such a church! It ought to have
been our St. Botolph's. ... Such a verdant covert wood Stothard
might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta
as they walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground shadowed with
bluebells, even to the formation of a plumb-like bloom upon its
little knolls and ridges; and ever through the dell windeth a little
path chequered with the shades of aspens and ashes and the most
verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude
stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass and
weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither.
Meanwhile the wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth
anew in some other shade. To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in
silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her
betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body) with Romance
before. Then suppose so much of a space cleared as maketh a small
church _lawn_ to be sprinkled with old gravestones, and in the midst
the church itself, a small Christian dovecot, such as Lamb has truly
described it, like a little temple of Juan Fernandes. I could have
been sentimental and wished to lie some day in that place, its calm
tenants seeming to come through such quiet ways, through those
verdant alleys, to their graves.

In coming home I killed a viper in our serpentine path, and Mrs.
Fernor says I am by that token to overcome an enemy. Is Taylor or
Hessey dead? The reptile was dark and dull, his blood being yet
sluggish from the cold; howbeit, he tried to bite, till I cut him in
two with a stone. I thought of Hessey's long back-bone when I did
it.

They are called _adders_, tell your father, because two and two of
them together make four.]

LETTER 351

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. A