Your Doctor seems to keep you on the long cure.  Precipitate healings are never good.

Don’t come while you are so bad.  I shan’t be able to attend to your throes and the dumbee at once.

I should like to know how slowly the pain goes off.  But don’t write, unless the motion will be likely to make your sensibility more exquisite.

Your affectionate and truly healthy friend C. LAMB.

Mary thought a Letter from me might amuse you in your torment—­

[Robinson was the victim of a sudden attack of acute rheumatism.  He had a course of Turkish baths at Brighton to cure him.]

LETTER 484

CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER

Enfield, April 29, 1829.

Dear Dyer—­As well as a bad pen can do it, I must thank you for your friendly attention to the wishes of our young friend Emma, who was packing up for Bury when your sonnet arrived, and was too hurried to express her sense of its merits.  I know she will treasure up that and your second communication among her choicest rarities, as from her grandfather’s friend, whom not having seen, she loves to hear talked of.  The second letter shall be sent after her, with our first parcel to Suffolk, where she is, to us, alas dead and Bury’d; we solely miss her.  Should you at any hour think of four or six lines, to send her, addressed to herself simply, naming her grandsire, and to wish she may pass through life as much respected, with your own G. Dyer at the end, she would feel rich indeed, for the nature of an Album asks for verses that have not been in print before; but this quite at your convenience:  and to be less trouble to yourself, four lines would be sufficient.  Enfield has come out in summer beauty.  Come when you will and we will give you a bed.  Emma has left hers, you know.  I remain, my dear Dyer, your affectionate friend,

CHARLES LAMB.

[From The Mirror, 1841.  Lamb made the same pun—­Bury’d—­to George Dyer in his letter of December 5, 1808.  His Album verses for Miss Isola I have not seen.]

LETTER 485

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD

[No date. ?  May, 1829.]

Dear Hood,—­We will look out for you on Wednesday, be sure, tho’ we have not eyes like Emma, who, when I made her sit with her back to the window to keep her to her Latin, literally saw round backwards every one that past, and, O, [that] she were here to jump up and shriek out “There are the Hoods!” We have had two pretty letters from her, which I long to show you—­together with Enfield in her May beauty.

Loves to Jane.

[Here follow rough caricatures of Charles and his sister, and] “I can’t draw no better.”

[I have dated this letter May, 1829, because Miss Isola had just gone to Fornham, in Suffolk, whence presumably the two letters had come.]