he fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely
orange-colored as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old
poets--and they were pretty sharp observers of Nature--describes them as
brown. But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the color of a
Maltese orange,"[D] which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of
Seville or St. Michael's, and may help to reconcile the difference. We
cannot speak from observation; but we remember at school getting our
fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry, (not having a
due caution of the traps set there,) and the result proved sourer than
lemons. The author of the "Task" somewhere speaks of their anger as
being "insignificantly fierce"; but we found the demonstration of it on
this occasion quite as significant as we desired, and have not been
disposed since to look any of these "gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden
aunts keep these "small deer," as they do parrots, to bite people's
fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to venture so near the
cage another time." As for their "six quavers divided into three quavers
and a dotted crotchet," I suppose they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next
budget of Fallacies, along with the "melodious and proportionable kinde
of musicke," recorded in your last number, of another highly gifted
animal.

* * * * *

Although Lamb took little, if any, interest in public affairs, and,
indeed, knew about as much of the events and occurrences of the day as
the sublime, abstracted dancing-master immortalized in one of the
letters to Manning, he appears to have been profoundly and painfully
impressed by the fate of Fauntleroy, the forger. He thought and talked
of Fauntleroy by day, and dreamed of Fauntleroy at night. And on the day
after the execution of that unfortunate man, Lamb, thus solemnly, yet
humorously withal, writes to his good friend Bernard Barton, poet and
bank-officer:--

"And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of
yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate
Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes
around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed
to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become
more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth
knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to
believe, have never devia