Come as soon as you can.

C. LAMB.

[1] The reversal of this serio-humorous mingling of fiction and forecast will be found in the next letter.

LIX.

TO MANNING.

December 26, 1815.

Dear Manning,—­Following your brother’s example, I have just ventured one letter to Canton, and am now hazarding another (not exactly a duplicate) to St. Helena.  The first was full of unprobable romantic fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home.  A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy; it sets the brain agoing; but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly.  Your friends, then, are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age,—­as that lying letter asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you keep tarrying on forever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your doing,—­but they are all tolerably well, and in full and perfect comprehension of what is meant by Manning’s coming home again.  Mrs. Kenney never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you.  Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature.  Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran-new gown to wear when you come.  I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity.  This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.  The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain.  One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in earnest.  Poor Priscilla!  Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years.  Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know.  Not but he has his horrid eye upon us, and is whetting his infernal feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in that impressive moral picture, “The good man at the hour of death.”  I have in trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton.  But we all hope that these letters may be waste paper.  I don’t know why I have foreborne writing so long; but it is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans.  And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fireside just as if you had never been away.  In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space!  I’ll promise you good oysters.  Cory is dead, that