Erratum in sonnet:—­Last line but something, for tender, read tend.  The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of honest, plain, old writing lurking there still.  They were not so mealy-mouthed as to refuse my verses.  Maybe, ’tis their oatmeal.

Blackwood sent me L20 for the drama.  Somebody cheated me out of it next day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, “All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors.”  Then I was better. [Rest lost.]

["Your four vols.”  Procter’s poetical works, in three volumes, were published in 1822.  Since then he had issued The Flood of Thessaly, 1823.  He was perhaps meditating a new one-volume selection.

“Anti-Capulets”—­the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).

“Badman.”  Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle’s friend Badams, a manufacturer and scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the philosopher spent some weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia (see the Early Recollections).

“Burke’s case.”  William Burke and William Hare, the body-snatchers and murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox’s school of anatomy.  Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January 28.  Hare turned King’s evidence and disappeared.  A “shot” was a subject in these men’s vocabulary.  The author of the Waverley novels—­the Great Unknown—­ had, of course, become known long before this.

“M.B.”—­Martin Burney.  In 1818 Lamb had dedicated the prose volume of his Works to Burney, in a sonnet ending with the lines:—­

        Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,
        I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

Hervey was Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799-1859), a great album poet.

“A sonnet of mine in Blackwood”—­in the number for January, 1829 (see below).

“Hessey”—­of the firm of Taylor & Hessey, the late publishers of the London Magazine.

Another letter from Lamb to Procter, repeating the request for verses, was referred to by Canon Ainger in the preface to his edition of the correspondence.  Canon Ainger printed a delightful passage.  It is disappointing not to find it among the letters proper in his latest edition.

Here (had I permission from its American owner to print it, which I have not) I should place Lamb’s instructions as to playing whist drawn up for Mrs. Badams’ use and as an introduction to Captain Burney’s treatise on the game.  It is a very interesting document and England has never seen it yet.

The Boston Bibliophile edition also gives a letter from Lamb to Badams apologising for his heatedness yesterday and explaining it by saying that he had been for some hours dissuading a friend from settling at Enfield “which friend would have attracted down crowds of literary men, which men would have driven me wild.”]