LETTER 486

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[No date.]

Calamy is good reading.  Mary is always thankful for Books in her way.  I won’t trouble you for any in my way yet, having enough to read.  Young Hazlitt lives, at least his father does, at 3 or 36 [36 I have it down, with the 6 scratch’d out] Bouverie Street, Fleet Street.  If not to be found, his mother’s address is, Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs. Tomlinson’s, Potters Bar.  At one or other he must be heard of.  We shall expect you with the full moon.  Meantime, our thanks.

C.L.

We go on very quietly &c.

["Calamy” would be Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), the historian of Nonconformity.

Mr. W.C.  Hazlitt in his Memoir of Hazlitt says that his grandfather moved in 1829 to 3 Bouverie Street, and in the beginning of 1830 to 6 Frith Street, Soho.  Young Hazlitt was William junior, afterwards Mr. Registrar Hazlitt and then seventeen years of age.]

LETTER 487

CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON

May 28, 1829.

Dear W.,—­Introduce this, or omit it, as you like.  I think I wrote better about it in a letter to you from India H. If you have that, perhaps out of the two I could patch up a better thing, if you’d return both.  But I am very poorly, and have been harassed with an illness of my sister’s.

The Ode was printed in the “New Times” nearly the end of 1825, and I have only omitted some silly lines.  Call it a corrected copy.

Yours ever, C. LAMB.

Put my name to either or both, as you like.

[This letter contains Lamb’s remarks on the Secondary Novels of Defoe, printed in Wilson’s Life and Times of De Foe, Chapter XVII. of Vol.  III., and also his “Ode to the Treadmill,” which Wilson omitted from that work.  See Vols.  I. and IV. of the present edition for both pieces.]

LETTER 488

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M.  June 3, 1829.]

Dear B.B.—­I am very much grieved indeed for the indisposition of poor Lucy.  Your letter found me in domestic troubles.  My sister is again taken ill, and I am obliged to remove her out of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can hope to have her again.  I have been very desolate indeed.  My loneliness is a little abated by our young friend Emma having just come here for her holydays, and a schoolfellow of hers that was, with her.  Still the house is not the same, tho’ she is the same.  Mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect of seeing her at this time; and with all their company, the house feels at times a frightful solitude.  May you and I in no very long time have a more cheerful theme to write about, and congratulate upon a daughter’s and a Sister’s perfect recovery.  Do not be long without telling me how Lucy goes on.  I have a right to call her by her quaker-name, you know.