Mister Clark is at perfect staggers! the whole fabric of his infidelity is shaken.  He has no one to join him in his coarse-insults and indecent obstreperousnesses against Christianity, for Holmes (the bonny Holmes) is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but a feeble quorum.  The children have all nice, neat little clasped pray-books, and I have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts’s Hymns for Christmas presents for them.  The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad principles in patois French.  But the strongholds are crumbling.  N. appears as yet to have but a confused notion of the Atonement.  It makes him giddy, he says, to think much about it.  But such giddiness is spiritual sobriety.

Well, Byron is gone, and ------ is now the best poet in England.  Fill up
the gap to your fancy.  Barry Cornwall has at last carried the pretty A.
S. They are just in the treacle-moon.  Hope it won’t clog his wings—­gaum
we used to say at school.

Mary, my sister, has worn me out with eight weeks’ cold and toothache, her average complement in the winter, and it will not go away.  She is otherwise well, and reads novels all day long.  She has had an exempt year, a good year, for which, forgetting the minor calamity, she and I are most thankful.

Alsager is in a flourishing house, with wife and children about him, in Mecklenburg Square—­almost too fine to visit.

Barron Field is come home from Sydney, but as yet I can hear no tidings of a pension.  He is plump and friendly, his wife really a very superior woman.  He resumes the bar.

I have got acquainted with Mr. Irving, the Scotch preacher, whose fame must have reached you.  He is a humble disciple at the foot of Gamaliel S.T.C.  Judge how his own sectarists must stare when I tell you he has dedicated a book to S.T.C., acknowledging to have learnt more of the nature of Faith, Christianity, and Christian Church, from him than from all the men he ever conversed with.  He is a most amiable, sincere, modest man in a room, this Boanerges in the temple.  Mrs. Montague told him the dedication would do him no good.  “That shall be a reason for doing it,” was his answer.  Judge, now, whether this man be a quack.

Dear H., take this imperfect notelet for a letter; it looks so much the more like conversing on nearer terms.  Love to all the Hunts, old friend Thornton, and all.

Yours ever, C. LAMB.

[Leigh Hunt was still living at Genoa.  Shelley and Byron, whom he had left England to join, were both dead.  Lamb, I assume, sent him a second copy of Elia, with this letter.

Cardinal Gonsalvi was Ercole Gonsalvi (1757-1824), secretary to Pius VII. and a patron of the arts.  Lawrence painted him.

For the present state of the London Magazine see next letter.  Leigh Hunt contributed to Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, among other things, a series of papers on “The Months.”  Hunt also contributed an account of the Honeycomb family, by Harry Honeycomb.