Of sun, and moon, and star, throughout the year,
        And man and woman.

You have vision enough to discern Mrs. Dyer from the other comely gentlewoman who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics.  But don’t try to write the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes.  The snow is six feet deep in some parts here.  I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this.  It is not good for weak eyes to pore upon snow too much.  It lies in drifts.  I wonder what its drift is; only that it makes good pancakes, remind Mrs. Dyer.  It turns a pretty green world into a white one.  It glares too much for an innocent colour, methinks.  I wonder why you think I dislike gilt edges.  They set off a letter marvellously.  Yours, for instance, looks for all the world like a tablet of curious hieroglyphics in a gold frame.  But don’t go and lay this to your eyes.  You always wrote hieroglyphically, yet not to come up to the mystical notations and conjuring characters of Dr. Parr.  You never wrote what I call a schoolmaster’s hand, like Clarke; nor a woman’s hand, like Southey; nor a missal hand, like Porson; nor an all-of-the-wrong-side-sloping hand, like Miss Hayes; nor a dogmatic, Mede-and-Persian, peremptory hand, like Rickman; but you ever wrote what I call a Grecian’s hand; what the Grecians write (or used) at Christ’s Hospital; such as Whalley would have admired, and Boyer have applauded, but Smith or Atwood (writing-masters) would have horsed you for.  Your boy-of-genius hand and your mercantile hand are various.  By your flourishes, I should think you never learned to make eagles or corkscrews, or flourish the governors’ names in the writing-school; and by the tenor and cut of your letters I suspect you were never in it at all.  By the length of this scrawl you will think I have a design upon your optics; but I have writ as large as I could out of respect to them—­too large, indeed, for beauty.  Mine is a sort of deputy Grecian’s hand; a little better, and more of a worldly hand, than a Grecian’s, but still remote from the mercantile.  I don’t know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school-days.  I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian!  And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides affection, I feel a reverential deference as to Grecians still.  I keep my soaring way above the Great Erasmians, yet far beneath the other.  Alas! what am I now? what is a Leadenhall clerk or India pensioner to a deputy Grecian?  How art thou fallen, O Lucifer!  Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., &c.

C. LAMB.

["I never writ of you but con amore.”  Lamb refers particularly to the Elia essay “Oxford in the Vacation” in the London Magazine, where G.D.’s absence of mind and simplicity of character were dwelt upon more intimately than Dyer liked (see Vol.  II.).