pare your Euripides with these sorrows, this death of
a wife! Compare Alcestis! Hecuba! or what not other sorrowing
Heroines of antiquity.

My cheeks are tear-bedewed as I revolve such slaughter. What more to
say, but to salute you Cary and your Cara, and wish you health,
ourselves enjoying it.

In _Mary and Charles Lamb_, 1874, by W.C. Hazlitt, in the Catalogue of
Charles Lamb's Library, for sale by Bartlett and Welford, New York, is
this item:--"_Euripidis Tragediae, interp. Lat_. 8vo. Oxonii, 1821". "C.
and M. Lamb, from H.F. Cary," on flyleaf. This must be the book
referred to. Euripides has been called the priest of pity.]

LETTER 533

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[P.M. July 14, 1831.]

Collier's Book would be right acceptable. And also a sixth vol. just
publish'd of Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of 18th
Century. I agree with you, and do yet _not disagree_ with W.W., as to
H. It rejoyced my heart to read his friendly spirited mention of your
publications. It might be a drawback to my pleasure, that he has tried
to decry my "Nicky," but on deliberate re- and reperusal of his censure
I cannot in the remotest degree understand what he means to say. He and
I used to dispute about Hell Eternities, I taking the affirmative. I
love to puzzle atheists, and--parsons. I fancy it runs in his head,
that I meant to rivet the idea of a personal devil. Then about the
glorious three days! there was never a year or day in my past life,
since I was pen-worthy, that I should not have written precisely as I
have. Logic and modesty are not among H.'s virtues. Talfourd flatters me
upon a poem which "nobody but I could have written," but which I have
neither seen nor heard of--"The Banquet," or "Banqueting Something,"
that has appeared in The Tatler. Know you of it? How capitally the
Frenchman has analysed Satan! I was hinder'd, or I was about doing the
same thing in English, for him to put into French, as I prosified Hood's
midsummer fairies. The garden of _cabbage_ escap'd him, he turns it into
a garden of pot herbs. So local allusions perish in translation. About 8
days before you told me of R.'s interview with the Premier, I, at the
desire of Badams, wrote a letter to him (Badams) in the most moving
terms setting forth the age, infirmities &c. of Coleridge. This letter
was convey'd to [by] B. to his friend Mr. Ellice of the Treasury,
Brother in Law to Lord Grey, who immediately pass'd