ecial voice at vestries;
and, domiciliating us, hath reflected a portion of his house-keeping
respectability upon your humble servants. We are greater, being his
lodgers, than when we were substantial renters. His name is a passport
to take off the sneers of the native Enfielders against obnoxious
foreigners. We are endenizened. Thus much of T. Westwood have I thought
fit to acquaint you, that you may see the exemplary reliance upon
Providence with which I entrusted so dear a charge as my own sister to
the guidance of a man that rode the mad horse into Devizes. To come from
his heroic character, all the amiable qualities of domestic life
concentre in this tamed Bellerophon. He is excellent over a glass of
grog; just as pleasant without it; laughs when he hears a joke, and when
(which is much oftener) he hears it not; sings glorious old sea songs on
festival nights; and but upon a slight acquaintance of two years,
Coleridge, is as dear a deaf old man to us, as old Norris, rest his
soul! was after fifty. To him and his scanty literature (what there is
of it, _sound_) have we flown from the metropolis and its cursed
annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy ink press of that
stagnant pool.

Now, Gillman again, you do not know the treasure of the Fullers. I
calculate on having massy reading till Christmas. All I want here, is
books of the true sort, not those things in boards that moderns mistake
for books--what they club for at book clubs.

I did not mean to cheat you with a blank side; but my eye smarts, for
which I am taking medicine, and abstain, this day at least, from any
aliments but milk-porridge, the innocent taste of which I am anxious to
renew after a half-century's dis-acquaintance. If a blot fall here like
a tear, it is not pathos, but an angry eye.

Farewell, while my _specilla_ are sound.

Yours and yours,

C. LAMB.

[This letter records the safe return of Mary Lamb with the Fullers.

"Squire Mellish." William Mellish, M.P. for Middlesex for some years.

Thomas Westwood's son, for whom Lamb found an appointment, wrote some
excellent articles in _Notes and Queries_ many years later describing
the Lambs' life at his father's.

"Old Norris." See letter to Crabb Robinson, Jan. 20, 1827.

_Specilla_ is probably a slip for _Conspicilla_.]

LETTER 497

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. December 8, 1829.]

My dear B.B.--You are very good to have been uneasy
about us, and I have