his coarse-insults and indecent
obstreperousnesses against Christianity, for Holmes (the bonny Holmes)
is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but
a feeble quorum. The children have all nice, neat little clasped
pray-books, and I have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts's Hymns for Christmas
presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at
Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad
principles in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N.
appears as yet to have but a confused notion of the Atonement. It makes
him giddy, he says, to think much about it. But such giddiness is
spiritual sobriety.

Well, Byron is gone, and ------ is now the best poet in England. Fill up
the gap to your fancy. Barry Cornwall has at last carried the pretty A.
S. They are just in the treacle-moon. Hope it won't clog his wings--gaum
we used to say at school.

Mary, my sister, has worn me out with eight weeks' cold and toothache,
her average complement in the winter, and it will not go away. She is
otherwise well, and reads novels all day long. She has had an exempt
year, a good year, for which, forgetting the minor calamity, she and I
are most thankful.

Alsager is in a flourishing house, with wife and children about him, in
Mecklenburg Square--almost too fine to visit.

Barron Field is come home from Sydney, but as yet I can hear no tidings
of a pension. He is plump and friendly, his wife really a very superior
woman. He resumes the bar.

I have got acquainted with Mr. Irving, the Scotch preacher, whose fame
must have reached you. He is a humble disciple at the foot of Gamaliel
S.T.C. Judge how his own sectarists must stare when I tell you he has
dedicated a book to S.T.C., acknowledging to have learnt more of the
nature of Faith, Christianity, and Christian Church, from him than from
all the men he ever conversed with. He is a most amiable, sincere,
modest man in a room, this Boanerges in the temple. Mrs. Montague told
him the dedication would do him no good. "That shall be a reason for
doing it," was his answer. Judge, now, whether this man be a quack.

Dear H., take this imperfect notelet for a letter; it looks so much the
more like conversing on nearer terms. Love to all the Hunts, old friend
Thornton, and all.

Yours ever, C. LAMB.

[Leigh Hunt was still living at Genoa. Shelley and Byron, whom he had
left Englan