“No shrimps!” (that’s in answer to Mary’s question about how the soles are to be done.)

I am uncertain where this wandering letter may reach you.  What you mean by Poste Restante, God knows.  Do you mean I must pay the postage?  So I do,—­to Dover.

We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons.  She was howling,—­part howling, and part giving directions to the proctor,—­when crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered, and then I knew that she was not inconsolable.  Mary was more frightened than hurt.

She’d make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).

  “If he bring but a relict away,
  He is happy, nor heard to complain.”

SHENSTONE.

Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence,—­like his poetry, redundant.  Hone has hanged himself for debt.  Godwin was taken up for picking pockets.  Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid.  Becky takes to bad courses.  Her father was blown up in a steam machine.  The coroner found it “insanity.”  I should not like him to sit on my letter.

Do you observe my direction?  Is it Gallic, classical?  Do try and get some frogs.  You must ask for “grenouilles” (green eels).  They don’t understand “frogs,” though ’t is a common phrase with us.

If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne), inquire if Old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades.  He must be a very old man.

[1] A dog given to Lamb by Thomas Hood.  See letter to Patmore dated September, 1827.

XCV.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

August 10, 1827.

Dear B. B.,—­I have not been able to answer you, for we have had and are having (I just snatch a moment) our poor quiet retreat, to which we fled from society, full of company,—­some staying with us; and this moment as I write, almost, a heavy importation of two old ladies has come in.  Whither can I take wing from the oppression of human faces?  Would I were in a wilderness of apes, tossing cocoa-nuts about, grinning and grinned at!

Mitford was hoaxing you surely about my engraving; ’t is a little sixpenny thing, [1] too like by half, in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery.  There have been two editions of it, which I think are all gone, as they have vanished from the window where they hung,—­a print-shop, corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,—­where any London friend of yours may inquire for it; for I am (though you won’t understand it) at Enfield Chase.  We have been here near three months, and shall stay two more, if people will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village.  So don’t direct to Islington again till further notice.  I