or something like it.  All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied.  Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the harpy Solitude from me.  I like ’em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my own.  I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference.  I would not, that I know of, have it otherwise.  I only wish sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret, but more pleasure,—­even a kind of gratitude,—­at being so often favored with that kind northern visitation.  My London faces and noises don’t hear me,—­I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W. W., etc., seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found.  I have scarce room to put in Mary’s kind love and my poor name.

C. LAMB.

W. H[azlitt]. goes on lecturing against W.W., and making copious use of quotations from said W.W. to give a zest to said lectures.  S.T.C. is lecturing with success.  I have not heard either him or H.; but I dined with S.T.C. at Oilman’s a Sunday or two since; and he was well and in good spirits.  I mean to hear some of the course; but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be.  If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern.  “Gentlemen,” said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying.  Mrs. Wordsworth will/ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realized.  Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned in the stamp-office that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon’s.  I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office, I hate all such people,—­accountants’ deputy accountants.  The mere abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon.  I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go,—­they are the tyrants, not Ferdinand, nor Nero.  By a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially observed custom of going at one o’clock of a Saturday,—­the little shadow of a holiday left us.  Dear W.W., be thankful for liberty.