are all in the Godwins'
hands; but one will be published very soon, and then you shall have
it _all in print_. I go on very well, and have no doubt but I shall
always be able to hit upon some such kind of job to keep going on. I
think I shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest calculation; but
as I have not yet seen any _money_ of my own earning, for we do not
expect to be paid till Christmas, I do not feel the good fortune, that
has so unexpectedly befallen me, half so much as I ought to do. But
another year, no doubt, I shall perceive it.

When I write again, you will hear tidings of the farce, for Charles is
to go in a few days to the Managers to inquire about it. But that must
now be a next-year's business too, even if it does succeed; so it's
all looking forward, and no prospect of present gain. But that's
better than no hopes at all, either for present or future times.

Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet;
you would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but
not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer
Night's Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I
taking snuff; and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make
nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he
finds out he has made something of it....

Martin [Burney] has just been here. My Tales (_again_) and Charles's
Farce has made the boy mad to turn Author; and he has written a Farce,
and he has made the Winter's Tale into a story; but what Charles says
of himself is really true of Martin, for _he can make nothing at all
of it_; and I have been talking very eloquently this morning, to
convince him that nobody can write farces, &c., under thirty years of
age. And so I suppose he will go home and new model his farce.

A little later, June 26, Lamb writes to Wordsworth:--

"Mary is just stuck fast in All's Well that Ends Well. She complains
of having to set forth so many female characters in boy's clothes. She
begins to think Shakspear must have wanted Imagination. I to encourage
her, for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work,
flatter her with telling how well such and such a play is done. But
she is stuck fast and I have been obliged to promise to assist her."

Then we have Mary Lamb to Sarah Stoddart again (early in July, 1806):
"I am in good spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been
reading over the _Tale_