with all that is good in your character.  Neither he nor I expect it from you, nor exact it; but if you would consent to it, you would have me obliged by it, as well as him.  He is just now in a critical situation:  kind friends have opened a coffee-house for him in the City, but their means have not extended to the purchase of coffee-pots, credit for Reviews, newspapers, and other paraphernalia.  So I am sitting in the skeleton of a possible divan.  What right I have to interfere, you best know.  Look on me as a dog who went once temporarily insane, and bit you, and now begs for a crust.  Will you set your wits to a dog?

Our object is to open a subscription, which my friends of the “Times” are most willing to forward for him, but think that a leave from you to publish would aid it.

But not an atom of respect or kindness will or shall it abate in either of us if you decline it.  Have this strongly in your mind.

Those “Every-Day” and “Table” Books will be a treasure a hundred years hence; but they have failed to make Hone’s fortune.

Here his wife and all his children are about me, gaping for coffee customers; but how should they come in, seeing no pot boiling!

Enough of Hone.  I saw Coleridge a day or two since.  He has had some severe attack, not paralytic; but, if I had not heard of it, I should not have found it out.  He looks, and especially speaks, strong.  How are all the Wordsworths and all the Southeys? whom I am obliged to you if you have not brought up haters of the name of

C. LAMB.

P.S.—­I have gone lately into the acrostic line.  I find genius (such as I had) declines with me, but I get clever.  Do you know anybody that wants charades, or such things, for Albums?  I do ’em at so much a sheet.  Perhaps an epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse.  I pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity; but ’tis, with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it “to order.”

SUUM CUIQUE

Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas
Fur, rapiens, spolians, quod mihi, quod-que tibi,
Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, Meum-que, Suum-que;
Omne suum est:  tandem Cui-que Suum tribuit. 
Dat laqueo collum; vestes, vah! carnifici dat;
Sese Diabolo:  sic bene:  Cuique Suum.

I write from Hone’s, therefore Mary cannot send her love to Mrs. Southey, but I do.

Yours ever, C.L.

[Major’s edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, mentioned in a letter to Barton above, was issued in 1830 with a memoir of Bunyan by Southey.  It was reviewed in The Times for May 7, 1830, I think probably by Lamb, in the following terms:—­