ls, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no
visitant. You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow's
letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials
on the mantlepiece with any hope of making a variation in their numbers.
You have counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and
deliberately curse your hard exile from all familiar sights and sounds.
Old Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly would just now be as good to
you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you from this intolerable weight
of Ennui. You are too ill to shake it off: not ill enough to submit to
it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The Tyranny of Sickness is
nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: 'tis to have Thirty Tyrants for
one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after
dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon
service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes
out, who _was_ something to you, something to speak to--what an
interminable afternoon you'll have to go thro'. You can't break yourself
from your locality: you cannot say "Tomorrow morning I set off for
Banstead, by God": for you are book'd for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I
thought a _cheerful letter_ would come in opportunely. If any of the
little topics for mirth I have thought upon should serve you in this
utter extinguishment of sunshine, to make you a little merry, I shall
have had my ends. I love to make things comfortable. [_Here is an
erasure._] This, which is scratch'd out was the most material thing I
had to say, but on maturer thoughts I defer it.

P.S.--We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party,
Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is,
to_day_), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you
as jolly and freakish as we mean to be.

C. LAMB.

[Addressed to "T. Dibdin Esq're. No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings,
Sussex."

"You have counted your spiders." Referring, I suppose, to Paul
Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the
Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.

"Grimaldi"--Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin's
employers.

"A pleasant party." Reynolds, the dramatist, would be Frederic Reynolds
(1764-1841); Bloxam we have just met; and Wyat of the Wells was a comic
singer and utility actor at Sadler's Wells.

Canon Aing