the Wit Without Money, and the Lover’s Pilgrimage.  Laugh and come home fat.  Neither do we think Sir T. Browne quite the thing for you just at present.  Fletcher is as light as Soda water.  Browne and Burton are too strong potions for an Invalid.  And don’t thumb or dirt the books.  Take care of the bindings.  Lay a leaf of silver paper under ’em, as you read them.  And don’t smoke tobacco over ’em, the leaves will fall in and burn or dirty their namesakes.  If you find any dusty atoms of the Indian Weed crumbled up in the Beaum’t and Fletcher, they are mine.  But then, you know, so is the Folio also.  A pipe and a comedy of Fletcher’s the last thing of a night is the best recipe for light dreams and to scatter away Nightmares.  Probatum est.  But do as you like about the former.  Only cut the Baker’s.  You will come home else all crust; Rankings must chip you before you can appear in his counting house.  And my dear Peter Fin Junr., do contrive to see the sea at least once before you return.  You’ll be ask’d about it in the Old Jewry.  It will appear singular not to have seen it.  And rub up your Muse, the family Muse, and send us a rhyme or so.  Don’t waste your wit upon that damn’d Dry Salter.  I never knew but one Dry Salter, who could relish those mellow effusions, and he broke.  You knew Tommy Hill, the wettest of dry salters.  Dry Salters, what a word for this thirsty weather!  I must drink after it.  Here’s to thee, my dear Dibdin, and to our having you again snug and well at Colebrooke.  But our nearest hopes are to hear again from you shortly.  An epistle only a quarter as agreeable as your last, would be a treat.

Yours most truly C. LAMB

Timothy B. Dibdin, Esq., No. 9, Blucher Row, Priory, Hastings.

[Dibdin, who was in delicate health, had gone to Hastings to recruit, with a parcel of Lamb’s books for company.  He seems to have been lodged above the oven at a baker’s.  This letter contains Lamb’s crowning description of Hollingdon Rural church.

“A Caledonian Chapel.”  Referring to the crowds that listened to Irving.

“Peter Fin.”  A character in Jones’ “Peter Finn’s Trip to Brighton,” 1822, as played by Liston.

“Tommy Hill.”  In the British Museum is preserved the following brief note addressed to Mr. Thomas Hill—­probably the same.  The date is between 1809 and 1817:—­]

LETTER 397

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HILL

D’r Sir It is necessary I see you sign, can you step up to me 4 Inner Temple Lane this evening.  I shall wait at home.

Yours,

C. LAMB.

[I have no notion to what the note refers.  It is quite likely, Mr. J.A.  Rutter suggests, that Hill the drysalter, a famous busy-body, and a friend of Theodore Hook, stood for the portrait of Tom Pry in Lamb’s “Lepus Papers” (see Vol.  I.).  S.C.  Hall, in his Book of Memories, says of Hill that “his peculiar faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a stableboy.”]