Kemble,
manager of Covent Garden Theatre. The play was never acted.

"Your refusal to lend your poetical sanction." This is not clear, but I
think the meaning to be deducible. The Icon was Pulham's etching of
Lamb. Evans was William Evans, who had grangerised Byron's _English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. I take it that he was now making another
collection of portraits of poets and was asking other poets, their
friends, to write verses upon them. In this way he had applied through
Lamb to Barton for verses on Pulham's Elia, and had been refused. This
is, of course, only conjecture.

"Your Drummonds"--your bankers. Barton's bankers were the Alexanders, a
Quaker firm.

"James Naylor." Barton had paraphrased Nayler's "Testimony."

Following this letter, under the date August 29, 1827, should come a
letter from Lamb to Robert Jameson (husband of Mrs. Jameson) asking him
to interest himself in Miss Isola's career. "Our friend Coleridge will
bear witness to the very excellent manner in which she read to him some
of the most difficult passages in the Paradise Lost."]

LETTER 426

CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE

Mrs. Leishman's, Chace, Enfield,

September, 1827.

Dear Patmore--Excuse my anxiety--but how is Dash? (I should have asked
if Mrs. Patmore kept her rules, and was improving--but Dash came
uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our
writing.) Goes he muzzled, or _aperto ore_? Are his intellects sound, or
does he wander a little in _his_ conversation? You cannot be too careful
to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he
makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you
believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and
collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who are
not used to them. Try him with hot water. If he won't lick it up, it is
a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or
perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is
his general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased--for
otherwise there is no judging. You can't be too careful. Has he bit any
of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep _him_ for
curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in
India had it at one time--but that was in _Hyder_-Ally's time. Do you
get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull out his
teeth (if he would let y