s, when the Daughter of the next
house came in with a friend's Album to beg a contribution, and the
following day intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung
up since. If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the
uttermost parts of the earth, there will Albums be. New Holland has
Albums. But the age is to be complied with. M.B. will tell you the
sort of girl I request the ten lines for. Somewhat of a pensive cast
what you admire. The lines may come before the Law question, as that
cannot be determined before Hilary Term, and I wish your deliberate
judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial. And if
you have not burnt your returned letter pray re-send it me as a
monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you
to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed
Annuals I have become a by-word of infamy all over the kingdom. I
have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There
be 'dark jests' abroad, Master Cornwall, and some riddles may live
to be clear'd up. And 'tisn't every saddle is put on the right
steed. And forgeries and false Gospels are not peculiar to the age
following the Apostles. And some tubs don't stand on their right
bottom. Which is all I wish to say in these ticklish Times ---- and
so your servant,

CHS. LAMB."

At the age of seventy-seven Procter was invited to print his
recollections of Charles Lamb, and his volume was welcomed in both
hemispheres as a pleasant addition to "Eliana." During the last eighteen
years of Lamb's life Procter knew him most intimately, and his
chronicles of visits to the little gamboge-colored house in Enfield are
charming pencillings of memory. When Lamb and his sister, tired of
housekeeping, went into lodging and boarding with T---- W----, their
sometime next-door neighbor,--who, Lamb said, had one joke and forty
pounds a year, upon which he retired in a green old age,--Procter still
kept up his friendly visits to his old associate. And after the brother
and sister moved to their last earthly retreat in Edmonton, where
Charles died in 1834, Procter still paid them regular visits of love and
kindness. And after Charles's death, when Mary went to live at a house
in St. John's Wood, her unfailing friend kept up his cheering calls
there till she set out "for that unknown and silent shore," on the 20th
of May, in 184