i. e., printed.  All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state.  The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is “Peter Bell;” but I am not certain.  You ask me about your preface.  I like both that and the supplement, without an exception.  The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me.  It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess.  I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it was in knowing what good verse was.  Who looked over your proof-sheets and left ordebo in that line of Virgil?

My brother’s picture of Milton is very finely painted,—­that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke’s.  It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time.  Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton.  There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not,—­it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first, I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had it rectified, It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading “No thoroughfare.”  Robinson’s is entire; I wish you would write more criticism about Spencer, etc.  I think I could say something about him myself; but, Lord bless me! these “merchants and their spicy drugs,” which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius!  I can’t even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper, I engross when I should pen a paragraph.  Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe; and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks:  Vale.

Yours, dear W., and all yours,

C. LAMB.

[1] “But thou, that didst appear so fair
       To fond imagination,
    Dost rival in the light of day
       Her dilicate Creation”

[2] Better known as “Rural Architecture.”

[3] The first line of the poem on Bolton Abbey:—­

    “‘What is good for a bootless bene?’
     With these dark words begins my fate;
    And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring
     When Prayer is of no avail?”