ing from you, then, you shall give us leave to expect you. I
have long had it on my conscience to invite you, but spirits have been
low; and I am indebted to chance for this awkward but most sincere
invitation.

Yours, with best love to Mrs. Cary, C. LAMB.

Darley knows all about the coaches. Oh, for a Museum in the wilderness!

[Cary, who had been afternoon lecturer at Chiswick and curate of the
Savoy, this year took up his post as Assistant Keeper of the Printed
Books at the British Museum. George Darley, who wrote some notes to
Gary's _Dante_, we have met. Allan Cunningham was the Scotch poet and
the author of the Lives of the Painters, the "Giant" of the _London
Magazine_. The Lambs seem to have been spending some days at Enfield.

Here should come a note from Lamb to Ollier asking for a copy of the
April _New Monthly Magazine_ for himself, and one for his Chinese friend
(Manning) if his jests are in.]

LETTER 393

CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO

[P.M. May 9, 1826.]

Dear N. You will not expect us to-morrow, I am sure, while these damn'd
North Easters continue. We must wait the Zephyrs' pleasures. By the bye,
I was at Highgate on Wensday, the only one of the Party.

Yours truly C. LAMB.

_Summer_, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its
usual severity.

Kind rememb'ces to Mrs. Novello &c.

LETTER 394

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. May 16, 1826.]

Dear B.B.--I have had no spirits lately to begin a letter to you, though
I am under obligations to you (how many!) for your neat little poem,
'Tis just what it professes to be, a simple tribute in chaste verse,
serious and sincere. I do not know how Friends will relish it, but we
out-lyers, Honorary Friends, like it very well. I have had my head and
ears stuff'd up with the East winds. A continual ringing in my brain of
bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some raw Angel. It is not George
3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather
seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge writing to
me a week or two since begins his note--"Summer has set in with its
usual Severity." A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I
do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling
hypocrites of Mays wither me to death. My head has been a ringing Chaos,
like the day the winds were made, befor