a little for gin and mutton and such trifles.

Excuse my abortive scribble.

Yours not in more haste than heart C.L.

Love and recollects to all the Wms. Doras, Maries round your Wrekin.

Mary is capitally well.

Do write to Sir G.B. for I am shyish of applying to him.

[Coleridge had been appointed to one of the ten Royal Associateships of
the newly chartered Royal Society of Literature, thus becoming entitled
to an annuity of 100 guineas. An essay was expected from each associate.
Coleridge wrote on the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, and read it on May 18.
His book was _Aids to Reflection_. See note on page 734.

"I shall miss my thirds." Lamb's pension was two-thirds of his stipend.

"Some d-----d people." A hint for Lamb's Popular Fallacy on Home, soon
to be written.

"Round your Wrekin." Lamb repeats this phrase twice in the next few
months. He got it from the Dedication to Farquhar's play "The Recruiting
Officer"--"To all friends round the Wrekin."

Here perhaps should come a letter to Mrs. Norris printed in the Boston
Bibliophile edition containing some very interesting comic verses on
England somewhat in the manner of _Don Juan_--

I like the weather when it's not too rainy,
That is, I like two months of every year,

and so on.]

LETTER 373

CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES CHAMBERS

[Undated. ? May, 1825.]

With regard to a John-dory, which you desire to be particularly informed
about, I honour the fish, but it is rather on account of Quin who
patronised it, and whose taste (of a _dead_ man) I had as lieve go by as
anybody's (Apicius and Heliogabalus excepted--this latter started
nightingales' tongues and peacocks' brains as a garnish).

Else in _itself_, and trusting to my own poor single judgment, it hath
not that moist mellow oleaginous gliding smooth descent from the tongue
to the palate, thence to the stomach, &c., that your Brighton Turbot
hath, which I take to be the most friendly and familiar flavor of any
that swims--most genial and at home to the palate.

Nor has it on the other hand that fine falling off flakiness, that
oleaginous peeling off (as it were, like a sea onion), which endears
your cod's head & shoulders to some appetites; that manly firmness,
combined with a sort of womanish coming-in-pieces, which the same cod's
head & shoulders hath, where the whole is easily separable, pliant to a
knife or a spoon, but each individual flake p