P.S.

        I had forgot, at Small Bohemia
        (Enquire the way of your maid Euphemia)
        Are sojourning, of all good fellows
        The prince and princess,—­the Novellos—­
        Pray seek ’em out, and give my love to ’em;
        You’ll find you’ll soon be hand and glove to ’em.

In prose, Little Bohemia, about a mile from Hastings in the Hollington road, when you can get so far.  Dear Dib, I find relief in a word or two of prose.  In truth my rhymes come slow.  You have “routh of ’em.”  It gives us pleasure to find you keep your good spirits.  Your Letter did us good.  Pray heaven you are got out at last.  Write quickly.

This letter will introduce you, if ’tis agreeable.  Take a donkey.  ’Tis Novello the Composer and his Wife, our very good friends.

C.L.

[Dibdin must have sent the verses which Lamb asked for in the previous letter, and this is Lamb’s reply.  Pride of ancestry seems to have been the note of Dibdin’s effort.  Probably there is a certain amount of truth in Lamb’s account of the resolute merriment of his father.  It is not inconsistent with his description of Lovel in the Elia essay “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.”

“I have stol’n a quip.”  The manner rather than the precise matter, I think.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Coleridge’s nephew, dated July 19, 1826.  It thanks the recipient for his kindness to the child of a friend of Lamb’s, Samuel Anthony Bloxam, Coleridge having assisted in getting Frederick Bloxam into Eton (where he was a master) on the foundation.  Samuel Bloxam and Lamb were at Christ’s Hospital together.]

LETTER 399

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

[P.M.  September 6, 1826.]

My dear Wordsworth, The Bearer of this is my young friend Moxon, a young lad with a Yorkshire head, and a heart that would do honour to a more Southern county:  no offence to Westmoreland.  He is one of Longman’s best hands, and can give you the best account of The Trade as ’tis now going; or stopping.  For my part, the failure of a Bookseller is not the most unpalatable accident of mortality: 

            sad but not saddest
        The desolation of a hostile city.

When Constable fell from heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D’avenant’s) to be sung by a Chorus of Authors,

What should we do when Booksellers break? 
We should rejoyce.