He has his boy with him.  I am teaching Emma Latin.  By the time you can answer this, she will be qualified to instruct young ladies:  she is a capital English reader:  and S.T.C. acknowledges that a part of a passage in Milton she read better than he, and part he read best, her part being the shorter.  But, seriously, if Lady St------ (oblivious pen, that was about to write Mrs.!) could hear of such a young person wanted (she smatters of French, some Italian, music of course), we’d send our loves by her.  My congratulations and assurances of old esteem.  C.L.

[Stoddart had been appointed in 1826 Chief-Justice and Justice of the Vice-Admiralty Court in Malta and had been knighted in the same year.  His daughter Isabella had just married.  Lady Stoddart’s literary efforts did not, I think, reach print.

“The deductions of severe reason.”  See the quotation from Cottle in the letter to Manning of November, 1802.

“A change of ministry.”  On Liverpool’s resignation early in 1827 Canning had been called in to form a new Ministry, which he effected by an alliance with the Whigs.

“Godwin’s Republic”—­History of the Commonwealth of England, in four volumes, 1824-1828.

“Fearn’s Anti-Tooke”—­Anti-Tooke; or, An Analysis of the Principles and Structure of Language Exemplified in the English Tongue, 1824.

Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated August 10, 1827, in which Lamb expresses regret for Matilda Hone’s illness.]

LETTER 424

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. 10 August, 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, ’tis a little sixpenny thing, too like by half, in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery.  There have been 2 editions of it, which I think are all gone, as they have vanish’d from the window where they hung, a print shop, corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincolns Inn fields, where any London friend of yours may inquire for it; for I am (tho’ you won’t understand it) at Enfield (Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase).  We have been here near 3 months, and shall stay 2 or 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 am trying my hand at a Drama, in 2 acts, founded on Crabbe’s “Confidant,” mutatis mutandis.

You like the Odyssey.  Did you ever read my “Adventures of Ulysses,” founded on Chapman’s old translation of it? for children or men.  Ch. is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity.  When you come to town I’ll show it you.